Awakening

I halted my descent. A solid gentleman, facing away from me and swaying woozily, was urinating at the bottom of the stairwell. Judging by his choice of location and the carelessness of his aim, it was clear he had invested no effort whatsoever in the enterprise. I surveyed my options. I could circle back and follow the cars into the parking lot, but that seemed like an absurd, even dangerous, detour. Short of foregoing dinner, the only viable course of action was to wait. And so I did, retreating to the footpath and doing my best to appear as if I were doing anything other than waiting for a drunk man to finish urinating. Returning to the head of the stairs, I watched the man wipe his hand on the side of his jeans, knock back a dreg from a can of lager and stumble off in a direction that—mercifully—took him off my course. But he had left me quite the obstacle. It was true that I needed food, and that the discount supermarket that lay beyond the urine-soaked stairwell contained food—but did I need food this badly? I had almost not ventured out at all. Relaxing on my bed at the onset of evening, I had considered just sleeping through my hunger and making up for it with a big breakfast the next day. What had finally convinced me to make the journey was the prospect of securing some cheap whisky along with my groceries. I had a romantic, if self-destructive notion of nursing a tumbler into the wee hours and bashing out some words. Or nursing a tumbler into the wee hours and listening to some podcasts. Or nursing a tumbler into the wee hours. Maybe this wretch had been a sign—a warning. Sampling Word’s Best Bars was one thing; sampling supermarket whisky alone in my room was, well, something else. But I had walked all the way down here—I should at least get something to eat. So I descended, stepping nimbly between pieces of broken glass and discarded waste, and, from the bottom step, leaping over the spreading puddle. The interior of the supermarket was desolate and cold, with an air of quiet desperation. It was as if it had been designed with the express purpose of reminding its customers which part of Edinburgh they were in.

Standing barefoot on the threshold of his room, the Hungarian man presented as anxious yet determined. He had caught me on my way back from the kitchen and, not having introduced myself previously, I had said hello. He wasn’t especially tall, maybe a shade below average, but his stocky, muscular physique, accentuated by a tight-fitting white T-shirt, gave him physical presence. He looked to be in his late 30s, and sported a neat beard and cropped, slightly receding hair. And with eyes nearly, but not quite, twinkling into tears, he relayed his tale.

He was born in Budapest, one of three brothers. His childhood had been pleasant and unremarkable, and there was no reason to suspect his adolescence would be any different. But everything changed in his fourteenth year, the year of his parent’s divorce. Their separation had left him confused and angry. He felt as if he no longer had a parental figure to outline the path of his life and he began to slide into delinquency. He became a drug addict. Then a drug mule. Attempting to ferry-in dope from Egypt, he finally got busted in an elaborate police operation.

Sometime after his release from prison, one of his brothers invited him to attend a church. He told me it was a ‘modern’ church, comparing it to Hillsong, the Christian megachurch that had been established in Sydney in 1983. Founded by a child-molester-sired window-cleaner from New Zealand and patronised by Justin Bieber, Bono and variation iterations of Kardashian, Hillsong directs much of its Pentecostal fervour into worship music, releasing numerous branded records and staging its sermons like rock concerts. When its founder, Brian Houston, learned of his father’s history of sexual abuse, he responded by arranging his discreet retirement and failing to inform the police. At a hastily organised meet-up, his father and a Hillsong official offered one of the victims $10,000 in exchange for their signature on a McDonald’s napkin. The victim followed up a couple of months later regarding the money they had been promised and an enraged Houston allegedly told them: “You know it’s your fault all of this happened—you tempted my father.”  The Royal Commission into the Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ultimately censured him for his conduct in the affair. Speaking on a light entertainment show in the year of the commission hearings, Houston made his stance clear: “…I hate paedophilia. I mean, I do. And I hate it more now—I always did hate it anyway, but I hate it even more now.”

The Hungarian man described his attendance of this analogous church as the defining moment in his recovery. And it happened on the very day his friend, who had been busted in the same operation, got released from jail—as if it were fated to be. Instead of being chastised for his actions, as he had been in the eyes of the law, he was told that he was here, and this is where he could be, and Jesus will come with him. And a verse sang out to him, that Jesus always was and always will be, and he realised that Jesus was the one who would save him. His heart was emptied of its broken contents and filled anew with love. He repented. He got clean. He became a dentist.

Now in Edinburgh, having chucked in dentistry, he was looking to build a new life. But in Edinburgh he could not stay. Edinburgh had become too liberal. He could see wayward youths, like his former self, allowed to roam free and do as they please. This was not the place to raise a family. No matter; he had been saved and he would go where he was destined to go.

“You’re not saying anything,” he observed.
“Uh—I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

I was hoping to blame some of my collection of wine and beer bottles on this other occupant, should it ever come up, but now he had been revealed as abstemious, that was off the table.

And I returned to my room and I climbed into bed and the spirit moved through me and I fell asleep.

When I woke up seven hours later, the spirit was gone.

Proposition on Sauchiehall Street

I had read, in some travel scrap or other, that despite its appearance, the street name is actually pronounced ‘sickle’. This seemed perfect to me: beyond how pleasingly a Glaswegian accent would render the word, there was the dissonance between its spelling—phonetically suggesting an extra syllable—and the compressed noise it represented; and there was the fact that it formed a neat homophone with the English word Sickle. This association lent the name an undercurrent of danger, befitting the street’s reputation for late-night rowdiness; and, symbolically, it evoked labour, which even post de-industrialisation felt appropriate. I carried this insider tidbit with me the entire time I was in Glasgow, smugly believing I was one of the few outsiders in the know. Each day, after I had crossed onto the street from the motorway, I would relish the sound of the two syllables in my head, forming redundant thoughts simply so I could employ the word. Here I am on Sickle. Once more on Sickle. Look, I’m leaning against a wall on Sickle. Of course, as it turned out, I had been misinformed. Sauchiehall Street is not Sickle Street. Sauchiehall Street is Sauchiehall Street. There is some disagreement among locals, but the correct pronunciation is either ‘saw-kee-hall’ or ‘suh-kee-hall’, with an aspirated k—meaning it’s actually fairly close to being phonetic. But the title scans better if you pronounce it ‘sickle’.

I was leaning against a wall on Sauchiehall, the daylight fading into gloom, pedestrians and traffic streaming before me, when I was yanked from my reverie by an interfering world. ‘Reverie’ is perhaps misstating things a tad; I was really at something of a loose end. I had a vague plan to catch a gig at Nice N Sleazy, the dreadfully named bar I was then standing beside, but it wasn’t due to commence for a couple more hours and I had run out of itinerary. In the end, I opted to—well, I opted to lean against a wall on Sauchiehall Street. The interfering world came in the form of a woman with long dark hair and bright lipstick, carrying a shopping bag. She was a little older than I was, perhaps in her late 30s or early 40s, and she wore jeans and a smart beige coat.
“Excuse me,” she repeated. “I need to…”
I apologised and shifted to the side—I had been blocking the keypad to her apartment building.
“It’s really OK,” she said, amused by the earnestness of my manner. She moved forward and began punching in a code. Then she paused.
“Do you want to come up?”
“Hm?”
“Do you want to come upstairs?”
I blinked, unsure how to process this surprise query.
“W-what for?” I eventually managed.
“I don’t know.”
I was not reassured by this answer.
“Your face is red,” she observed, helpfully. “You’re shy?”
“Yep.”
She laughed.
“So do you want to come up?”
“Uh, no, I’m OK, thanks.”
“All right, then.”
The woman disappeared inside the building and I resumed my leaning.

The exchange replayed itself in my thoughts, recurring like a stuck record. I wondered if I had done the right thing—if I had acted appropriately. Surely it was only sensible, given the limited information available to me, to have heeded my internal warnings and declined the offer. Who knows what terrible fate might have befallen me had I acquiesced? I could have been the target of a scam, some sinister operation where hapless men are enticed into secluded areas before being divested of their valuables by thick-set goons-in-waiting. I probably seemed an easy mark, too: alone, diminutive, foreign. And why stop at robbery? Who’s to say I would not have been chloroformed the moment I set foot in the apartment, that I wouldn’t have been crammed inside a large sports bag, transported to a meat locker and coaxed back to consciousness in order to witness my own (protracted) disembowelling? Admittedly these were remote possibilities, but the solo traveller is wise to exercise caution. I did, yes, consider a more plausible scenario: that I had been propositioned by a sex worker. After all, what had I done, exactly, that would induce a complete stranger into inviting me up to their place? I had obscured a keypad. I had moved out of the way and said sorry. And there had been no special effect in my utterance of that one word. If anything, it had been poorly enunciated. A seasoned broadcaster may have been able to inject those two syllables with charisma and charm, but a seasoned broadcaster I am not. Or was it offensive to assume there had been some ulterior motive? Was it insulting, sexist, narrow-minded to believe this woman was not just acting on the agency of her own whims?

Let’s assume, for the sake of another paragraph, that this woman had simply asked me up to her apartment because she felt like having company and sensed that I did, too. What would have happened if I had followed her up those stairs? As I leaned against that cold Sauchiehall wall I imagined something far worse than being scammed or robbed—something more terrifying, even, than being dissected in a meat locker. I could picture every detail. She would unlock the door of her apartment and I would follow her in, hesitantly, trailing a few paces behind. She would place her groceries on the counter and her keys in a bowl, and I would shuffle over to some awkward spot. Then she would say “I’m back”. I’d freeze; there would be someone else there—a roommate, a friend, a partner. It wouldn’t matter who it was. The only thing that would matter would be the fact that the woman who had just brought me into her apartment would have to explain my presence to a third party. And I could not conceive of any explanation that would not be mortifying, that would not cause this person to look on me with utter disgust. You mean you just asked a random guy on the street to come upstairs and he said Yes? And this is him? This… thing blushing in the corner? 

And if there hadn’t been anyone else there? If it had just been me and her? What then? I might be straining credibility by saying this, but to the extent that I was tempted by the proposal, it was not out of any carnal consideration. Which isn’t to say I didn’t find the woman attractive, or that I would have objected, necessarily, if the evening tended in that direction. Rather, it’s that my dream outcome would have been chaste: a connection forged over long, unexpected conversations with a stranger, on a memorable night out in Glasgow. Had I let my nagging doubts scare me away from the very thing I was seeking in my travels? Not to evoke mediocre Jim Carrey vehicles, or the mediocre books upon which they are based, but I am so inept at meeting people, and so desirous of new experiences, that I had resolved, in the days leading up to my departure from Melbourne, to go along with anything; to break out of my comfort zone; to do things I would otherwise avoid. I would obey the call to adventure. Even if it meant something terrible happening. Maybe especially if it meant something terrible happening. And adventure had come calling. Adventure had come calling while I was leaning against a wall on Sauchiehall Street, wishing that something exciting would happen. And what had I said to adventure? Uh, no, I’m OK, thanks. What a fool I had been!
“Sure you don’t want to come up?”
The woman with long dark hair had re-emerged from the entrance.
“Uh…” I started.
I took a breath.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”

The Great Silence

“I can’t quite place your accent. Where are you from?”
“Australia,” I replied, halting my breakfast preparations in the kitchenette.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you so pale?” 

I knew nothing especially concrete about Glasgow when I booked my accomodation. I had no knowledge of its constituent districts, no clue as to which areas would reveal the city’s character and which would thoroughly obscure it, only a hazy, indefinite conception of Glasgow as a whole. My principal considerations, in the dreary evening I spent surveying my options, were cost and proximity to the city. I eventually settled on one of the cheaper places that matched the brief, a shared flat about half an hour’s walk from the city centre, and forgot about it entirely until, a month or so later, the journey rolled around.

The morning after I settled in—by pushing my luggage into a corner and climbing under the supplied doona—I discovered I was fortuitously situated; so fortuitously situated, in fact, that for my second pass through Glasgow I tried (in vain) to book the same place. The flat turned out to be in Finnieston, the area which, according to The Sunday Times, was the hippest place to live in all of Britain. Whatever truth this assessment had at the time it was made—surely the true hippest place in Britain would never be recognised as such by The Sunday Times—the discoverer effect, not unlike the observer effect in physics, means that it is certainly no longer the case. Propinquity to a trending stretch of Scotland was not, however, the reason I was personally so pleased with the location. (Like any self-respecting hipster, I expend most of my energy trying to convince people I’m nothing of the sort.) The reason why my small carpeted room with the door that didn’t fully close, let alone lock, was so perfect was that it oriented me between the two parts of Glasgow I ended up sinking the most time into: a decent café and the Mitchell Library.

The Mitchell Library was, by some distance, my favourite location in the city. A multi-level behemoth under a magnificent rain-faded dome, it was both an excellent destination in its own right and the ideal place to go before, between and after my engagements, when I wasn’t quite up to wandering through drizzle. You find, the longer you travel, that places in which you can sit, read and rest, with no pressure to buy a coffee you don’t really want, and no sense that your presence is impeding business, are truly worth their weight. Thanks to the cafeteria on the ground floor—serving up affordable, if not terribly edible, fare—it is actually possible to spend up to 11 consecutive hours inside the library without ever needing to leave. It is especially renowned for its ancestry and historical resources, though I confess I never really bothered to investigate them, opting instead to brush up on my Japanese and, I don’t know, write these ghastly things. But of all its qualities (soundproof music booths! Did I mention soundproof music booths?) perhaps the most commendable is the ease with which you are able to secure a library card and avail yourself of its services, even if you are, as I was, a mere passer-through. It was the library, more than anything else, that convinced me to return to Glasgow for an extra week before I left Europe. 

I sampled a fair handful of cafés during my stay, but the one right around the corner, on Argyle Street, was by far the best. Its food was hearty and well-balanced—rarely a given—and it offered a choice of filter coffee distinguished by method and bean variety. It was, as should already be evident, on the hipster end of the spectrum, and it was a little odd that the staff had no counter to stand behind, necessitating a lot of conspicuous leaning, but it was laid-back enough that neither of these things was sufficiently off-putting to, well, put me off. When not too busy, it was a joy to read and write and while away the morning in, bested, at this point in my travels, only by a Dunedin joint whose write-up I have excised from the historical record.

Of course, I didn’t spend all my time in libraries and cafés—just the overwhelming majority of it. At the art school up the Scott Street slope I caught a gig by Spoon, supported ably by Adam Buxton. The former was tight, boring, undeniable; the latter, affable, impish, amusing. Nothing life-altering, but I did get to witness Spoon’s frontman, Britt Daniel, (accidentally) cut his pinkie during one of the recitations of “I turn my camera on/I cut my finger on the way” on ‘I Turn My Camera On’. And, after ducking into a pub to escape the weather, I did befriend, sort of, or was befriended by, sort of, a group of theatre folk, afterwards accompanying them to a performance-art piece in which a man dressed as a giant baby (an associate of theirs) balletically assaulted a pram.

It rained, of course, and more than once, but the weather was generally pleasant, in line with my grey tastes. According to a local, I had caught Glasgow on the one or two days a year in which it is habitable.

The Novelist

Absent the pull of exploration I spent a mellow afternoon inside the Southhampton Arms, perhaps the pleasantest of the pubs I visited while in London. Appropriately I had not discovered its existence via some cursory online query, nor had I happened upon it by chance; instead, it had been recommended to me by an old friend, the sombre descent of evening unexpectedly calling up his memory. He had generously responded to my email with a heaping of local knowledge, all of it useful, though I was saddened to learn he had relocated to Melbourne a few months prior to my arrival and would not be available for the drink I had proposed. Watching the slow fade-out of the afternoon I wondered, again, what would become of me once my wanderlust, and savings, dried up.

After the Arms I headed to Greek Street, Soho, for a froth at the Pillars of Hercules. Here, in a previous decade, the emerging men of letters—among them Clive James, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan—sat in thrall to Ian Hamilton, the formidable editor of The New Review. The New Review itself was relatively short-lived, running from 1974 to 1979, but its fierce editorial voice and extraordinary stock of contributors produced an outsized legacy. Though the journal featured (some) female authors, the scene which fermented around the pub—handily adjacent The New Review’s main office—was overwhelmingly male, the Pillars functioning as much as a boys' clubhouse as it did an extension of the office proper. Prospective correspondents would approach Hamilton through a heavy cloud of tobacco smoke as he leaned cooly on the bar, all-day-drinking but imperceptibly impaired, and indulge his vices and company until he deigned to give them assignment. At other times they would seek payment, having discovered that a coldly received submission had been accepted—and published—after all. The compensation for underpayment, or non-payment in the form of a bouncing cheque, was a measure of exposure and first-hand experience of Hamilton's exacting editorial standards—an arrangement that, for the inexperienced writer, was almost fair. 

No matter how harsh you are on your own abilities, no matter how routinely you intimidate yourself into impotence, the effect of subjecting your work to a respected third party’s opinion, ideally someone you both admire and fear, can be transformative, especially in the developmental phase that precedes a career. Even those writers who wear their rejections as badges of honour, as proof that their inner voice is the only voice they need, would have had, at some point, that figure, that editor or teacher or peer who saw through their efforts to disguise their weaknesses and sent them back to the writing board dispirited yet invigorated—because that figure’s approval suddenly meant more than their own. For a generation of hungry Greek Street grafters, Ian Hamilton was that figure.

I have long fantasised about being part of an artistic scene. Not one of those scenes whose constituents are grouped together artificially according to aesthetics or background, but something far more tangible: a scene which exists entirely within the confines of a specific café or bar. Something in the spirit of the Enlightenment coffee houses, or the many dark taverns of literature—a place where inter-disciplinary discourse flows and ramshackle creative communities are forged. Maybe such scenes do exist, somewhere, but they likely exist beyond my scope; I am a singularly dreadful networker. Until I find one, or indeed found one, I will be forced to consider MacBook-friendly cafés and, God help us, shared workspaces as the modern-day equivalents. Even the less susceptible to nostalgia must concede that these examples hardly constitute scenes; for one thing, freelancers typically isolate themselves from one another. Eyes locked on screens and ears stuffed with music, they scarcely even experience their surroundings. Your average freelancer is not leaving their apartment to engage with the wider world: they are leaving their apartment to leave their apartment. It is a working exercise, a strategy to improve productivity. All of which is fine; as long as they are adequately compensating the cafés and being mindful of other customers, it’s their own business. My point is merely that they are ruining my fantasy.

I was realistic enough not to expect the 2017 incarnation of the Pillars of Hercules to live up to the accounts I had read of it. 39 years had elapsed since The New Review shut up shop, during which time the pub had surely changed hands. But I entertained a faint flicker of hope that subsequent generations of authors had conspired to keep something of its history alive. Cautiously I pushed open the door and walked inside.

What I entered was a small, unremarkable city pub. Crammed full of Soho yuppies, the hubbub was deafening. Here you could barely compose yourself, let alone a poem or essay. I snagged a free spot in the back and downed a moody pint. I could see nothing that suggested there were writers in attendance: no pens, no laptops, no paperbacks on the bar. Which is not to say there weren’t writers there that night—writers don’t always venture out with their instruments of trade on display. But there was no pulse of culture. Visiting the Pillars of Hercules of today is about as meaningful an experience as standing in a carpark built over the site of a famous battle.

Seeking an atmosphere more conducive to writing—in terms of noise level and lighting if nothing else—I returned to the American Bar at the Savoy and ordered something from the cheaper end of the menu: whisky. No concept, no stand, no soliloquy. Though I was served by someone else, the bartender from my previous visit managed, momentarily, to catch my eye, and I noticed something flicker across her face. I wondered if it had been mere recognition or— No, it’s silly. But then, I was a pretty irresistible prospect. Grubby of jacket, sullen of face, near-mute. I remember our first exchange, the lines crisp, playful, touched with spark. “How long are you in London?” she had asked. “A couple of days. I mean, until I leave. I’ve been here for a few days already. So about a week?” I had electrically replied. And now I was back and I was wearing a better T-shirt.

On this occasion my only significant interactions were with my assigned bartender, a Slavic gentleman with smartly arranged blond hair. He was intrigued by the scrawl in my notebook, to which, in between infinitesimal sips, I would add the odd sentence.
“Are you a writer?” he asked.
“I— Well,” I began. Was I a writer? Hardly. But what do I say instead?
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you writing a book?”
Am I writing a book? A whole entire book? Those things with all the pages?
“Yes,” I said.
“What’s it about?”
What’s it about? What’s the book-that-I’m-definitely-writing about?
“Um, it’s not really at the point where it’s about anything. It's— It's in an early stage.”
He asked if I had a publisher and if I had written any previous books, two questions I was able to answer truthfully.
“Well, I wish you the best of luck with it,” he said. The warmth with which he spoke disarmed me.
“Thanks,” I murmured, colouring slightly.

I looked down at the notebook lying open on the bar. Did it, through some miraculous accident, contain the workings of a novel? Were the sentences I had just written about lying to a bartender a novel?

While I have written, avocationally, for most of my life, I have generally resisted the business of book-writing. I never felt qualified, never believed I had the skills or discipline to see a work of such scale through to completion. Truth be told I’m not even a good reader, having once lost an entire deck of playing cards inside 52 unfinished books. And the act of writing has only grown more excruciating with time—so much so that I am convinced my faculties are actively trying to discourage me, perhaps in the hope I’ll take up a less taxing pursuit. Every word, every mark of punctuation, is a battle. For the majority of the process these battles do not feel like battles in a just and noble war, a war which must be won at all costs, but rather skirmishes in a quagmire, bloody, wasteful engagements lacking sense or cause. Occasionally I take comfort in Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer as “someone for whom writing is more difficult than for other people” but it is important to note that this struggle is not in itself evidence of greatness, or even aptitude. The only evidence of greatness in writing is evidence of greatness in writing, whatever the difficulties of its creation. It is not something you can necessarily intuit in advance. Of course, actually following through on your ambitions isn't without its dangers. In researching the poet Matthew Arnold, Ian Hamilton came upon the following lines in Arnold’s notes, concerning an aborted work:

It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits—and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself. 

It is tempting to surmise that Hamilton saw in these words not just a reflection of Arnold’s struggle but of his own. He was an infrequent poet, averaging about two poems a year, and while his output was respected, his activities as an editor, journalist and biographer received far greater attention in his lifetime. But there is little evidence to support such a narrative, certainly none in the interviews he provided towards the end of his life. Most likely these lines resonated for Hamilton in the same way they would resonate for countless other artists: as a perfect distillation of creative anxiety.

The prospect of extending the torment of writing across however many months or years it would take for me to complete a novel, grappling with these awful questions as I went, was a terrifying one. But I couldn’t just lie to the bartender and move on with my life. I had to make it right. I had to write this damn book.

It has been a year since I made this resolution and I am pleased to report that I am nearly finished. Well, that’s not strictly accurate. But I’ve certainly considered starting.

Beasts of Crystal Palace

On a still, grey, temperate London morning I rode a bus to Crystal Palace Park. Named for the building which hosted the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851, the park is now something of an anachronism, being merely the site where the palace was relocated before it burned to the ground in 1936. All that remains of the palace are, well, remains: a stairway to an empty plateau, weather-worn stone barriers and a handful of statues. Otherwise it has the feel of any large suburban park, albeit one richer in features. The best of these features is Dinosaur Court, an enclosed area around the lake where ancient mottled green beasts pose for curious children and greying 31-year-old ex-children. These 19th century models, designed in consultation with a then-eminent palaeontologist, were intended to be scientifically accurate representations of extinct species, the first of their kind in the world, but 164 years of developments in the field have instead rendered them quaint monuments to an earlier, more ignorant age. Monstrous and misshapen, they recall creatures from fantastical stop-motion effects sequences more than anything that ever actually walked the earth.

Wandering among these peculiar forms proved to be an eerily familiar experience: I had spent hours of my youth obsessing over images of the park in a jumbo-sized dinosaur magazine, the models' idiosyncrasies immediately distinguishing them from the more standard renditions found elsewhere in the issue, and now here they were, on the same logs and islands and rock formations, mere feet from where I stood. I was taken back to scenes from my childhood, to weekend afternoons lying on rot-patterned floorboards, flipping through dinosaur compendiums with my brother. Mostly I would search for illustrations of my favourite dinosaur, the Parasaurolophus, a duckbilled herbivore with an attractive curving crest. The compendiums which neglected to include it would always end up at the bottom of the return pile. Like most kids with a dinosaur fixation, I spent far more time liking dinosaurs than learning about them.

Curiously, on this still, grey, temperate morning, I was, as far as I could discern, the only tourist. Beyond families with strollers and the occasional echoing cry from the sports stadium, the place was quiet and serene, a respite from the overcrowded parks of the city. I sat on a bench on the hill overlooking the dominion of the magnificent plump-bellied Iguanodon and drifted off inside a book.

Biggles at the World's Best Bar

The American Bar at the Savoy Hotel is, according to a mysterious collective of drink writers, bartenders and cocktail aficionados, the World’s Best Bar. This prestigious title is administered annually by an entity known as Williams Reed Business Media Ltd, at what Williams Reed Business Media Ltd copywriters describe as “the drinks industry’s most anticipated night of the year”. The same company is responsible for compiling the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants and Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants; its takeover of the World’s 50 Best Bars list, previously the dominion of Agile Media’s Drinks International publication, portends a thrilling new era of Williams Reed Business Media Ltd list-making.

An inventory of the world’s best bars, administered by entities with names like ‘William Reed Business Media Ltd’, is exactly the type of content you might stumble upon on an indeterminate overseas holiday, when your ambition has begun to wane and your tired fingers have mashed out a syntactically incoherent Google query with the word ‘bars’ in it.

When I entered the American Bar in a crumpled jacket in 2017 I didn’t know I was entering the World’s Best Bar. At the time it was merely the World’s Second Best Bar, the 2017 list having not yet been released, and my expectations were accordingly low. Though I was curious to know what, exactly, constitutes a World’s Second Best Bar, my visit had not been premeditated. I had planned to rendezvous with a friend from my hometown that evening, after we discovered we were both travelling in London, but our itineraries—hers more than mine—ultimately defeated us, and I found myself wandering the Strand in something of a despondent air. It was as I passed the Savoy Hotel, on my way nowhere in particular, that I remembered William Reed Business Media Ltd’s list. I knew that, should I choose to walk through those grand doorman-operated doors, I would be throwing a match into my efforts at economy, but in that moment I didn’t care; the warmth and vulgar opulence were drawing me in.

The American Bar, of the Savoy Hotel, of Fairmont Hotels, of FRHI Hotels & Resorts, of AccorHotels, does not need my review. Nor, I’m sure, do any of the bars that grace William Reed Business Media Ltd’s list. I am not, by any stretch, qualified in this arena, and my words will not sway business one way or another. Nevertheless, it may prove instructive for me to extrapolate, from my experience, the types of qualities William Reed Business Media Ltd judges favour. Perhaps it will inspire one of my more entrepreneurial readers—readers?—to start up their own world-renowned cocktail bar.

At the World’s Best Bar you are greeted by an unfailingly professional host who presides at a podium at the top of a dark stairway.
“Are you a guest at the hotel?” the host will enquire.
The host will then direct you, without even appearing to raise an eyebrow at your weather-worn outfit, to an appropriate seat. As you are alone, how about a seat at the bar? You follow the host across the sleek, patterned carpet, past the centrepiece piano, to the elegant white-surfaced bar area, where, before a mirrored display of close-lit bottles, white-jacketed bar staff assemble their tonics.
“Is this your first time with us?” one of the bartenders will ask, placing a leather-bound menu before you on the bar.
The correct answer is No, but you may, like me, answer truthfully, in which case brace yourself.

The menu is expensively produced and about as thick as a quarterly journal. As this is your debut appearance, the bartender will explain, at length, the concept behind it—because you can’t receive the honour of being the World’s Best (or World’s Second Best) Bar without a Concept. The finest drinks, the greatest service, the perfect atmosphere—none of these things will matter if your menu doesn’t tell a story. According to its advertorial, the American Bar’s 2017 concept was “a journey, coast to coast, travelling through the country’s cocktail character and content”. This was no clearer as explained to me by the poor bartender who had to deliver the introductory monologue, but I expect this was at least partly by design: mixologists surely prefer amorphous concepts to specific ones. The most I could tell you is that it had something to do with geography and historic industrial developments. Though you may not believe it possible at the time, you will eventually be released from this dispiriting lecture on the country's cocktail character and afforded an opportunity to select and consume alcohol. The menu, with its elaborate descriptions and handsome greyscale illustrations, presents itself as something of an obstacle, overloading you with so much detail you will find it nearly impossible to make any sort of informed decision. Fortunately the staff at the American Bar are trained for such eventualities and will be available to recommend a drink based on your flavour preferences. In my case I stumped for something with hops in it because apparently my palate is fucking beer.

When your drink arrives, it does not arrive alone. It will be accompanied by a bespoke cocktail stand designed around the drink’s theme—in reality, some ghastly object vomited up by a 3D printer—and an additional monologue from your tireless bartender. Mine arrived inside a miniature lantern of some description and included silver leaf and egg white foam—but you’d complain if they didn’t go all out at this price. What the geographic or historical significance of my drink was, I couldn’t tell you, but I vividly recall staring into the bartender’s eyes, sensing the cumulative effect these recitations were having on her soul and attempting to convey with my expression the sentiment, It's OK, you don’t have to do this. I’m just here to have a fancy overpriced drink. I don’t need the lore—really.

Truth be told, the drink was fine. Not ‘18 pounds fine’, exactly, but certainly not unpleasant. I do not wish to instil the impression in the reader—reader?—that this was in any way a dud operation. If AccorHotels is concerned enough with its reputation to post fraudulent TripAdvisor reviews, it’s hardly going to allow London’s longest-surviving American-style cocktail bar to be marred by sloppy execution. It would be fair to say, then, that the World’s Best Bar is easy to mock but difficult to fault. There were some unsavoury elements in attendance—guests of the hotel and people who had decided, without self-consciousness or irony, to drink there—but we shared neither glance nor word; and though the old world glamour of the bar’s interior wasn't really to my tastes, it at least fuelled the fantasy that I was not just another sucker lured in by Williams Reed Business Media Ltd.

Unless my experience was an aberration, the one thing for which the American Bar truly deserves a measure of scorn is its function as a piano bar. When I arrived, I had merely to contend with the sound system, the music from which was so unobtrusive, I have retained no memory of it. But at some stage in the evening it was replaced by a live performance at the piano, courtesy of a husky-voiced American who had been imported in for the occasion. Fatally, inexorably, he began his journey through the Great American Songbook. Whichever of its selections had not already been damaged beyond repair by ubiquity were dealt fatal blows by the American's husky, hoary, hacky renditions. I have a great deal of admiration for the songwriters involved in the Great American Songbook; I don’t care for all of the songs, necessarily, but I can respect the craft that went into them. Nevertheless, I would not hesitate to cast the entire volume into the fire to be spared another witless rendition by charlatans in cocktail bars.

The American Bar at the Savoy Hotel may be some people’s idea of a great bar—specifically Williams Reed Business Media Ltd’s stock of drink writers, bartenders and cocktail aficionados—but it is not mine. The bars I favour tend towards the Japanese model: small owner-operated joints in which the interests and idiosyncrasies of the owner are integrated into the design. I think of G7 in Nishi-Ogikubo, with its clean, bright interior matching its owner’s preference for pristine jazz-pop, every element assembled just so, and I think of the Flamingo Café & Bar in Osaka, its small counter overflowing with mismatched curios. Places like these are a world away from the corporate tastefulness on display at the American Bar. A good bar, moreover, should contain a mixture of emotions: joy and conviviality intermingling with wistfulness and sadness. A bar’s Don Birnam may be destroying his own life, but he is playing a critical role in the microcosm of the bar. He is reminding the other patrons of the dark. He is reminding them of suffering. Of disease. Of class. Of poverty. Of vague existential despair. He is a warning of how bad it can truly get. There but for the grace of God— And he knows that there are no good bars or bad bars or best bars. There are only bars. And anyone who thinks differently, anyone who believes there is a sad, fucked-up romance to insobriety, is a fool.

The American Bar, being an upscale hotel bar, does its best to obscure this sadness. People aren’t slumping down from their suites at the Savoy to prop up the bar. Perhaps an errant lost-weekender has stumbled in once or twice, but I doubt it; there are more cost-effective routes to oblivion. Instead of Don Birnam, the World’s Best Bar had me, an RFC pilot gazing into the void of his notebook.

Vampyre

Being just off Buckingham Palace, St James’ Park is not so much a park as a place with far too many people in it. It lacks the vast dimensions of Hyde Park, in which, as its name suggests, you can isolate yourself without great difficulty. But I wasn’t there to appraise the thing. I was there to pay my respects to the greatest Hey! in the history of popular music.

It occurs towards the end of The Go-Betweens’ ‘Spirit of a Vampyre’, a Side 2 cut from their glossy 1987 release Tallulah. With all due respect to the other Heys in the song—the first, in the coda, is sublime—the best instance is the third, the Hey which announces the park in question. The sudden shift of location is peculiar; the song opens with the narrator wasting away in a clinic near L.A.—when did we cross the Atlantic? But the momentum from that Hey transforms what might otherwise be an esoteric reference into something joyful, invigorating, entirely in keeping with the song’s mercurial recovery narrative. In the first pre-chorus we hear the saviour figure, the lover, imploring the protagonist to “learn to dance, learn to act, learn the piano”; by the end of the song, they are making jewellery together and—we guess—strolling through St James’ Park, the seedy Californian clinic a fading memory.

Thirty years later I am watching a squirrel bound about in front of St James’ Park Lake, its body and tail tracing its own trajectory over the grass. I hear the gurgly throttle of a helicopter and a winding siren, and I wonder about L.A., that dark, vampiric city.

I Am in Paradise

I suspect, when the moment came, when I had positioned myself in the middle of the bridge and leaned over the railing, I looked as if I might hurtle myself into the Thames, as if I were weighing up the strands of my life in the face of oblivion. But had any of the passers-by been blessed with preternatural hearing, they would have heard a soft male voice singing “Dirty old river, must you keep rolling…” He’s brutalising the melody, they would mutter to their companions as they passed. But (they would add) his mimicry of Davies’ peculiar dental consonants is quite remarkable. The sunset, for its part, provided in so majestic a fashion you might have assumed it had been computer-generated: a fiery orange glow rising behind the river-front, dramatic streaks of chalk-textured cloud, a darkening pastel-blue sky.

'Waterloo Sunset’, The Kinks’ soggy 1967 masterpiece, is practically the aural definition of Wistful. After an appropriate chromatic descent, the song settles into a sighing acoustic groove and we are introduced to our protagonist: a reclusive, sunset-loving voyeur. Though his perspective is frequently undercut by gently mocking backing vocals, he emerges a sympathetic figure; how could he be anything but in such achingly evocative surrounds? 'Waterloo Sunset' may not be so imperishable an achievement that it survives my impromptu rendition, or indeed subsequent description (I apologise if you observe a diminishing of its effects during your next listen), but it’s surely as close as any guitar-playing humans have managed. Below I have catalogued the pertinent details of the song as well as my success in observing them.

• Dirty old river (the Thames; observed)
• Busy people (London; observed)
• Taxi lights (London; observed)
• Window from which to view the world (my accomodation had a window; world was visible from it; observed)
• Chilly evening (London; observed)
• Terry and Julie at Waterloo Station (impossible to verify, but it’s plausible that I may have unknowingly observed a Terry and a Julie at the station)
• Millions of people swarming like flies round Waterloo Underground (peak-hour; observed)
• Terry and Julie passing over the river (again, impossible to verify and highly unlikely, but plausible; existence of Waterloo Bridge observed)
• Waterloo Sunset (paradise; observed)

When it was dark I caught the train back to Kennington and, I don't know, ate cheese in my room or something.

Biggles in Bed

‘Should I leave my room?’ is not, I expect, a question that troubles the brow of your average tourist. Of course you should leave your room. What, after all, would be the point in being in a world-famous city like Paris or London if you’re sequestered away from it the whole time? Why suffer the attendant costs and hassles of travel if you’re never really going to experience your destination? But as the months wore on I found myself increasingly crippled by this question, even if I still, with rare exception, made an appearance outdoors. That’s why cheap hostels, for all their hideous deficiencies, are ideal. When your digs discourage lounging and function solely as locations in which to sleep and shower, you have a persistent incentive to go outside, to fill your days with activity, to do what you’re supposed to do when you're overseas: explore.

My place in London could not exactly be described as luxurious; I was sharing a small apartment on the 22nd floor of a tower block in Kennington and I never experienced more than five consecutive minutes of hot water. But it offered privacy and the use of a kitchen, two amenities which can make even the dreariest of accomodations feel homely and inviting—provided, of course, you’re as adept at keeping yourself amused as I am. Such cosy arrangements pose a danger to the would-be explorer. London is a fine city, no two ways about it, and I’m not surprised that people—people?—persist in endorsing it. It’s London; you’re supposed to like the thing. But how could it possibly compete with a bed, a beer and block of cheese? It’s not as if I didn’t try, or rather explore, other options. I even, on one occasion, dined at a fancy restaurant. It wasn’t especially expensive (in the scheme of things), but when I invest anything above, say, six pounds on a meal, the sensation of loss, the dawning realisation I've invested poorly, tends to dull my palate.

So my memories of London aren’t much to write home about. I wandered the streets, poked my head into some galleries and museums, and sulked in the odd bar. In truth, I’m not sure the city ever quite came into focus during the week I was there. I left with no sharp observation, no special insight that could not have been gleaned from a cursory glance at a cursory travel feature. But it was comforting to learn there were relatively few ingredients in the recipe of my happiness—even if this prospective vegan hadn’t expected one of them to be cheese.

The Parasite

Caught in the momentum which carries you to the end of a novel, I stayed up past 2 am finishing The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a book I had begun, fittingly, in Berlin. Its conclusion induced a sort of dreamy paralysis, and it was some minutes before the room reasserted itself and prosaic considerations returned to my thoughts. I decided not to rouse my friend’s sweet-natured cat, nor, potentially, the other occupants, by unfolding the sofa bed to sleep, so I sat back in the gloom, in the half-light from the window in the opposite building, and stared out into a future that had no shape.

This was my first real experience of couch-surfing. No discredit to my couch-providing friend, who was astonishingly accommodating of my weeks-long takeover of his living area, but the inherent imbalance of the arrangement—free accommodation in exchange for less of an apartment—made it difficult for me not to feel like something of an intruder. A couple of times I pushed my good fortune by going about my ablutions in too leisurely a fashion while my friend’s boyfriend, also staying at the time, was rushing to meet an appointment. It speaks to my frame of mind during this period that my solution to any disharmony I may have caused was to write a self-deprecating poem entitled ‘Le parasite’, in which, among other crimes, I would confess to accidentally staining a bed sheet with the contents of a blister. Despite labouring determinedly in sunbathed gardens across Paris, I never managed to knock the thing into satisfactory shape, thank the merciful Lord. But because we’re friends, or family, or distant acquaintances, you can endure one stanza of stodgy iambic tetrameter.

Unearthly sounds awake the dead;
You stir and stumble for the light.
Displayed upon the sofa bed:
A snoring, farting parasite.

As if homing stray Australians weren’t commendable enough, my friend, the fabulous Monsieur T, took me to concerts and films, introduced me to his circle of similarly friendly, intelligent, creative Parisians, and arranged experiences I could not have hoped to have stumbled into unassisted. I’m sure I missed some of the subtleties—that is to say, all the words—of the three-hour presidential debate I had occasion to witness, but I won’t quickly forget the image of the deeply odious National Rally candidate baring her teeth in some alien approximation of a smile while the Anxious Left, gathered together in a small apartment, munched contemptuously on carrot sticks.

A few days later I accompanied Estlin, a pseudonymous friend of Monsieur T, to the ballot box and witnessed the casting of one of the 20,743,128 votes that did not go to Marine Le Pen. Estlin further increased my debt to the French by treating me to a couple of conversation-rich breakfasts and sending me on my way with a gift: her copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I’ll admit my first reaction, upon seeing the 716-page tome suddenly presented to me, was not gratitude but logistical concern; I had already acquired too many books on my travels and the business of packing was becoming increasingly physical. But there was no question of rejecting such a kind gesture—and, indeed, I wished to read the book.

Fortunately the heavens were smiling on me on the day of my departure and I managed to squash the Mann into a front compartment.

Peak Thrills

My primary goal, during my early explorations of Paris, was not to soak up the city’s rich heritage, thoughtfully preserved though it is, but to find and photograph locations from Philippe de Broca’s 1964 adventure film, L’Homme de Rio. Like most acts of love, it was a pointless exercise, of exactly no value to the wider world, but there was a definite thrill in stepping inside the frame of a favourite film. Even on my own limited terms I can’t pretend I was thorough; I ended up making it to only a couple of locations, neither especially iconic to the film—but then, I wasn’t in Rio. After one such excursion, during which I snapped a corner used in a car chase, I chanced upon a tiny art cinema that was running a season of Jean-Paul Belmondo films. Eagerly I scanned the titles, but L’Homme de Rio, alas, was not one of them. I grabbed a ticket to L'Opérateur instead and wandered in to take my seat.

The theatre was small and, discounting a scattering of lone males, empty. While The Cameraman (to use its original title) was less of a thematic complement to my non-adventures, there was still a Paris connection: the version of the film that is screened today exists, in part, due to the discovery of a complete print in Paris after a fire at MGM destroyed what were thought to be the only copies. An inventive, intermittently sublime confection, The Cameraman represents the last occasion in which Buster Keaton had true creative control over his work; thereafter the reality of his disastrous deal with MGM saw the greatest of the silent clowns appearing in a series of increasingly dispiriting misfires until his drunken despondency, during production on the justly forgotten What! No Beer?, finally got him fired.

Because his films—the ones that endure—are so exhilaratingly constructed, it is easy to overlook the fact that Buster Keaton is among the most beautiful people to ever appear on a cinema screen. His famously immovable face, able to convey emotion without apparent alteration, commands the gaze with deep, sad-cow eyes and chisel-perfect cheekbones. The Great Stone Face, as he was affectionately known, was indeed worthy of being carved into stone. It is a beauty which is difficult to define, but the toothsome combination of stoicism, innocence and—always—melancholy would have made Keaton an arresting screen presence even if he weren't a supremely gifted filmmaker.

There is a scene in the film in which Keaton’s character, the titular cameraman, travels to a baseball stadium to record footage of a Yankees game. When he arrives the stadium is empty and he is informed by a groundskeeper that the Yankees are, in fact, playing in a different city that day. After the groundskeeper departs, Keaton’s dejection transforms unexpectedly into playfulness; abandoning his efforts to tame his tripod, he walks over to the pitcher’s mound and begins play-acting, recreating the familiar mannerisms and manoeuvres of a pitcher in extraordinary detail before doing the same at the other end as an imagined batsman. Sitting in that little screening room, watching Keaton round the bases for his triumphant home run, I found myself inexplicably on the verge of tears.

Untested courage aside, I’ll be the first to admit that I would relish the opportunity to embark on a globe-trotting quest to rescue Françoise Dorléac from artefact thieves; it would make for great copy. But merely flying to another country does not guarantee adventure. In other words, buckle up for more exciting tales of weeping to cinema.

Plump sur l'amour

As much as I hate to affirm clichès, I confess I fell in love in Paris. It happened on my second day there, on a still, sun-flooded morning, about half an hour after I passed by the crowds at Notre Dame. It was something I hadn't expected, something I didn't even believe I was capable of. Not anymore. Yet there it was, that chest-hollowing rush, as intense, as vivid, as all-consuming as any teenage feeling. Though experienced enough to be cautious, I did not try to fight it; I let it carry me on its furious current, without a thought or care for where it would take me. And why not? I had quit my job, ended my lease, crammed my every possession inside a wooden container, and I was in a foreign city—the foreign city for love.

I hadn't been in Paris long—half a morning and an afternoon—but it was long enough to recognise the extent to which it is lifted by love. Without love, Paris would surely exhaust you with its splendour, its riches of art and architecture and discount supermarket wine. Without love it might even register that the Seine smells like piss and everyone is an arsehole. But add that finishing spark of romance and the rudeness washes off, and a syrup glow pours from the sky. Suddenly you're in your own mediocre summer movie and Paris is little more than the pretty backdrop of your dull fling.

I'm not sure I would have fallen in love had I only seen the ground floor. It has a creditable collection, certainly, and a charming enough ambience, but many a bookshop could promise the same. What did it were the elements upstairs: the antique volumes, the alcoves for reading and writing, the piano, the resident cat. Combined, these treats were absorbing enough to offset the passage of club-footed tourists, most of whom spent far more time disobeying the instruction not to take photographs than they did browsing the books. When not strolling aimlessly by the canal in the 19th, I could be found nestled beside the placid old cat in the poetry section, fancifully imagining I could learn French from Verlaine and Rimbaud. If that weren't contemptible enough—it is contemptible enough, but stay with me—some days I would transfer to the alcove with the typewriter and hammer out the kind of execrable nonsense you couldn't even rescue a comma from. I thought about taking this to the extreme and becoming a tumbleweed—one of those aspiring writers who, in exchange for some odd jobs and a one-page profile, sleep free of charge in the bookshop—but I felt enough of a fraud as it was.

A couple of doors down, beside Shakespeare and Sons' rare book outlet, there is an affiliated café. Having marinated myself in snatches of books I'd never finish, I would slip into a free spot overlooking the Seine—or rather, the road beside it—and enjoy a filter coffee and a slice of lemon pie, like the irredeemable beacon of privilege I am.

"Did you go to that bookshop again today?" my French friend would ask, returning to the apartment to find, as always, an Australian redolent of hummus and €2 sauvignon blanc at his table. Was it a note of resentment I could detect? Resentment, perhaps, at my overstaying my welcome in France and spending all my time in an English-language bookshop? It was difficult to tell with those erotic French voices. Maybe he was simply trying to warn me that my love affair would not last, that it could not last. He would have been right, too. It didn't last.

One day, having cleared my afternoon of any canal-strolling, I climbed the narrow winding stairs to the first floor and discovered that all the alcoves were occupied. I had expected this would happen sooner or later—it would have been controlling of me to demand otherwise—but it was still painful to see it. Even the cat appeared to be missing. I sought recovery in the cafè, repeating my favourite order, but the lemon pie turned up pale and waxy and the coffee had an acrid bite.

I stepped outside and the world was restored to grey.

Biggles the Sex Tourist

Reeperbahn must come as something of a shock to the naïve Beatles fan. There are no real monuments or museums, none, at least, that would justify the journey, and the few remaining venues associated with The Beatles are nestled among grim outlets of the sex trade. I'm told it's less sleazy now than it was, but it was plenty sleazy for me. On the day I visited, a fittingly foul Sunday, my only hope was that I was projecting enough of a 'Beatles fan' vibe to distinguish myself from the men who had come here to ejaculate against one-way mirrors.

My history with The Beatles extends back about as far as I can remember. The first music I purchased—my very first purchase, in fact—was a copy of Past Masters, volumes I and II, on double-cassette, which I found in an odds-and-sods shop near Melbourne Central. That is not to say I was precocious; it was simply that my taste in music, at that malleable age, was wholly a reflection of my parents' influence. There were many treasures to be found in their collection of LPs, but it was the Beatles records that my brother and I enjoyed the most—to the point where they began sounding like album-length extensions of 'Revolution No. 9'. We further repaid our parents' trust by cutting out all the cut-outs from an original mono pressing of Sgt. Pepper's.

In Primary School, when I was scarcely taller than the American basketball caps I wore, I would boast of my ability to name a hundred Beatles songs off the top of my head. I can't imagine this endeared me to anyone, but I remember an intrigued teacher stepping in once to correct me, gently, on one of the titles I had rattled off. He probably hadn't expected an argument.
"It's 'Buffalo Bill'!" I insisted, red and indignant; I was not backing down.

When my teenage years hit, I rejected the music of my childhood, as one does, and sought to define myself via more contemporary sounds. This meant that for a spell—and it must have been a spell—I subjected my poor ears to entire Offspring records, end-to-end. My brother and I even ceased our habitual borrowing of Help! on VHS. But as my taste matured, The Beatles returned. For all their grotesque ubiquity, I could not shake their achievement. The buggers were in my bones.

At the bar across from Kaiserkeller, the bar where The Beatles and their peers drank and where McCartney, in 1989, famously settled an outstanding bill, I climbed onto a stool and tried to drink away the taste of my lunch. The bartender, a descendant of the original owner, was enjoying a radio set firmly to '80s pop, the music of her youth. Out of the cycle, perfect and pure, came a call from my homeland: John Farnham's 'You're the Voice'. There was no use denying it.

I was glad I hadn't come to Hamburg solely for this—to say I had stood near the building where a Beatle had nailed a condom to the wall and set his room on fire. I had spent the previous day with a couple of old friends in Wedel, one of whom had finally cleared up the mystery of snooker for me. A horizontal hailstorm may have cost me my umbrella—a tragedy from which I am yet to fully recover—but the day had made the trip from Berlin worthwhile.

I sloped out of the bar and into the fading afternoon. Failed secret agents eyed me cautiously from their brothel-adjacent posts. Searching for change for my ticket back, I realised I was out of cash.

I'll say this about Reeperbahn: for all its seediness and substandard lunches, you certainly don't want for ATMs.

The Ecstasy of Aging

I stopped being thirty a few days before leaving Berlin. I was asleep at the time, probably in the middle of some idiot dream, but I remember the feeling when I woke. I remember the low, humid feeling that followed me from my bed to the park-facing window, where I stood scratching my chaste navy boxers. There had been no warning, no fanfare, no streamlined e-form to complete; I just woke up and there I was—not thirty, but in my thirties, standing nearly naked by the window of a journalist's room in Prenzlauer Berg.

I don't so much mind the ticking over of years. Though I'm not convinced growing older yields anything other than poorer health and conservatism, it hardly helps to fight it. Not when you've nothing to wield but your impotence. No; what I mind is the accumulation of waste that birthdays—especially birthdays—call attention to, the lost time that heaves under every well-intentioned wish, the fat of hours spent in thrall to Bobby Flay's Barbecue Addiction. The effect would be lessoned, I'm sure, with achievements behind you—if you had managed to make something of those foolish, energetic years. Because who would deny you a relaxed decline then? Without the spectre of failure to haunt over you, you could really settle into your remaining days, plump and placid, exercising the old talent only when, or rather if, you felt like it. You could stare out from your veranda with a bottle of shiraz (ranked best in its bracket) and frown at the changing demographics in your neighbourhood. Perhaps you'll have children and grandchildren who you've suffered and who now suffer you, familiar faces that sometimes appear and sit opposite you at your kitchen table and dole out bits of their lives. And when you die—cirrhosis, surely—you'll get an obituary from an actual journalist instead of some ignoble family-authored scrap. Because you worked when you were young and foolish and you made yourself immortal.

It was below ten when I left the apartment and I was typically underdressed. Rounding by the park, I saw tiny snowflakes drift down and vanish on the footpath. It was only the second time in my life I had witnessed snow.

When evening came I headed out to the bar featured in Parquet Courts' 'Berlin Got Blurry' video, an old-fashioned drinking hole filled with crusted-on regulars. It had changed hands since the video was shot, and the new owner, whose English was poorer than your average Berliner, had never heard of the band. He got me to write down the details for him before I left, as apparently I had not been the first to make the pilgrimage. We talked here and there but mostly I kept to my tall draughts, and my tangle of thoughts.

It was one of my more subdued birthdays, certainly. But maybe this is how birthdays should be. Wake up feeling terrible and find a couple of things to do that you enjoy. There's no need to involve other people.

On the Undimmed Majesty of Brandenburg Gate

Few Great Sights—of the few Great Sights I have seen—succeed in rising above their attendant hassles. Even where these are mild, when the bright-coloured bodies clear, and a spell keeps the hucksters away, Great Sights tend to be dwarfed by their reputations. You note the thing on some list or other—10 Must-See Sights in X Location: Don't Die Before Seeing Them All!—and persuade yourself to make the pilgrimage—because how could you possibly travel all the way to X Location and not see X Sight? It may have been exhaustively documented by previous visitors, to the extent that you already know it better than parts of your own neighbourhood, but surely nothing compares to seeing it In Person; surely photos and mid-afternoon travel shows could never truly do it justice. Resolute, excited, you rise at 5 am, outsmarting the lazy late-risers who will stream in at noon, and carefully plot out your journey. And you take the bus or train or ferry and you arrive, finally, at the Great Sight, and you stand before it, and you think, 'Huh. There's that thing from the photos.'

And so it was with Brandenburg Gate.

The King of Berghain

I'm not sure I know why I decided to conquer Berghain. I am not, by nature, a conquerer, and I was happy enough sipping bargain pints and grooving almost perceptibly to Steely Dan at my favoured local. Perhaps it was because Berghain concentrated everything I loved most under one absurdly brutalist roof: pompous exclusivity, throbbing Eurotrash techno, public sex acts. Perhaps I foresaw a perverse thrill in being turned away at the door for some arbitrary reason after queuing for three hours in the cold Berlin air. Perhaps, more plausibly, I wanted something to write about.

Being based in the hain of its name, I was able to reach it relatively quickly on foot. And by 'it' I mean the industrial lot a kilometre from the building proper where the end of the queue was located. Taking up my place behind a hundred optimistic, time-rich Berliners, I could just about make out the grey slab of hedonism twinkling in the distance. Though I did not seriously expect to make it in, I began to wonder what I would do if I actually did. Somehow it did not strike me as the type of venue one could safely document from the margins, at least not without engaging in a public sex act or two. Would it be ungracious of me to simply poke my head in, mutter "Huh", then, satisfied it wasn't my jam, quietely retreat to a nearby dive? But it was silly to speculate. I would be turned away the moment the bouncer laid eyes on the shabby configuration of items I called an outfit. But I was wrong. I was not turned away.

Instead, I left the queue voluntarily with a trio of Irishmen, having lasted a grand total of ten minutes. We headed in the direction of a less mythic nightclub with a smaller queue, on the recommendation of a passing New Zealander. The journey took us by a remnant of the Berlin Wall, and my superficial knowledge of Russia's involvement in the whole affair was enough to qualify me as the historian of the group. This was to be the night, long mythologised, in which one historian from Melbourne and three pharmaceutical workers from Cork took on the collective might of Berlin's nightclubs and lived to tell the tale. Actually, I can only speak for myself; I lost track of the Irishmen and never acquired their contact details. They might well have met gruesome ends on the streets of Berlin that night.

The three friends—I guess they bonded over being Irish and having the same dumb job—had flown in a couple of days prior with debaucherous designs on the long-weekend. How fortuitous for them to have stumbled upon a seasoned enabler in the form of a small, greying Australian, even if his predilection for consuming low-grade cheese by the block was a little too hardcore for their tastes. They told me they had spent the better part of their holiday, of which only this night remained, mercilessly taking the piss out of one another, prompting the gentlest of the trio to wonder why they could not just be kind and mutually respectful. This anecdote circulated the limited tracks of conversation more than once that evening, and I got the impression they were confronting a bleak existential truth they had not the faculties to process.

The other club, Watergate, did indeed feature a shorter line, but it still snaked a disheartening distance from the entrance. Less inclined to queue, I spied an opening and managed to cut in, my heftier—that is, man-sized—companions slipping in behind me. This reduced the wait to a manageable twenty minutes, just enough time for the Irishmen to source some lactose-free narcotics before we were face-to-chest with our final obstacle: Watergate's bouncer. A sagging, clip-fastened length of rope, manned by said bouncer, was now all that separated us from sub-Berghain ecstasy.

I'm not entirely clear on why we were ejected. The bouncer claimed it was because he had attempted to talk to us multiple times and we had refused to engage with him, as if he were some petulant child, but none of us had any recollection of this. Not that there was much point speculating: the fascists at Watergate lacked any sort of appeals process. All we could do was gather what remained of our pride and slink off to find somewhere less exclusive. Inspired—if that's an appropriate word to apply to the act of selecting shitty nightclubs—one of the Irishmen led the charge into a Kreuzberg venue he remembered from a previous night, only to scurry straight out as if it were primed to explode.
"Gay night," he said, grimly.
I presume his research into the first nightclub he had been queuing for had not been exhaustive.

Our last stop for the night, recommended to us by a cab driver, was a club whose door policy was based less on demographic factors and the whims of bouncers, and more on a person's ability to part with 7 Euros. It was here, among young Turks, that I lost the Irishmen. If, after some loutish display, they were slain by a gang of roving aesthetes, I feel I must apologise to their families for my carelessness.

Despite having consumed my body weight in alcohol, despite having paid to be there, my disinclination to dance remained very much in tact. For anyone similarly afflicted, I would not recommend positioning yourself anywhere on the dancefloor of a nightclub. Certainly you should avoid standing morosely in the centre like your dog's been shot. Strangers don't like that.

The Case Against Dancing

I think I'm in West Germany1—there's no signage.2 Too cool for that. Just a door covered in stickers & a graffitied stairway up to the first floor— Sitting here while everyone else is dancing to 'The Way You Make Me Feel' (I wished it was 'Leave Me Alone'3), I notice that some hot sauce from the falafel I had for dinner has dried on my left pant leg. [Biro rendition of beer mug.4] Now I have to wash the bloody things. The crowd is fairly mixed, in age & gender, to a lesser extent race. I'm hot but I don't want to lose my jacket, where this notebook lives. I'm gonna have to do laundry anyway so I may as well sweat the fuck out of it. [Over page.] I'm not sure anyone here can dance. I say that as someone who knows he can not dance himself. They're hopping from one foot to another, with a wide gait—& I'm the twat against the window writing about it. / Could probably participate in this dancing business & not stand out, but no— Pointing—that's when you know you can't dance, when you point. I wonder if I could get kicked out for just sitting at the periphery w/ a notepad. Goofy, loping steps, side to side—throw away those inhibitions. Are inhibitions so bad that they must be thrown away? [Over page.] I'd like to keep some of my inhibitions. Seriously—loping about like they're doing the fucking twist / It's hot & smokey—some people now doing the 'air maracas'—"You Know You're a Bad Dancer When..." Are there no more bands?5 But what about the band with 'Anus' in the title that I saw on the setlist?6 Surely I haven't missed them?7 Were they the half-naked middle-aged punks playing when I first got here?8 They're moving like there's no tomorrow. But I know there's a tomorrow. I'm acutely aware of it. It's a Saturday. Easter Saturday. The 16th.9 The 16th is tomorrow.10 [Over page.] Three loping steps then let's mix it up with a spin.— Where the fuck are the toilets. Somehow everyone's dancing at a different tempo—even though there's a clear fucking beat—I'm still sick. My eyes feel dry & weary, my nose is threatening to run / I just remembered there's dry hot sauce on my pants.

1 It was actually The Monarch.↩
2 There was. It said "The Monarch".↩
3 Not because its sentiment mirrored my own at the time of writing; I just prefer it.↩
4 Cubic-comic.↩
5 No.↩
6 They were the half-naked middle-aged punks who were playing when you first got there.↩
7 Well, you heard half a song.↩
8 Bingo.↩
9 Actually Easter Saturday was the 15th.↩
10 Ibid.↩

The Guy Who Went out with a Cold

When I think of Berlin, I think of snot. This isn't Berlin's fault, per se; my arrival simply happened to coincide with the commencement of a week-long cold. Of course, Berlin, with its chilly air, persistent rain and grossly affordable beer, could hardly be said to have conditioned a swift recovery, and the hostel I had booked was more suited to coming down with things than recuperating from them. None of my symptoms were especially severe, but having defective taps for nostrils did stifle my irresistibility a touch. I feel like I blew my nose in at least half the city's restrooms, trumpeting out great viscous webs into hastily assembled toilet paper catchments while the occupants of neighbouring stalls surely imagined the worst.

Disentangling the mozzarella of mucus from my memories of Berlin, I can, with some effort, think of other things—beer and falafels, for example, both of which were so freely available I hardly bothered consuming anything else. A couple of the falafels even qualified as passable, which is nothing to sneeze at, though I did several times, adding much-needed seasoning in the process. Running down the list (What I Think of When I Think of Berlin), I think next of dog shit and cigarette butts. I never had occasion to sample either, but I'm reliably informed they are among the best in Central Europe. Which is to say, Berlin was grungier than I had expected—if 'grungy' is the right word for that certain something an overabundance of dog shit and cigarette butts lends a place. I should add that I was not exactly in the grungiest spot; my hostel was located in gentrified Friedrichshain, parts of which had a generic European air. But certainly one was never too far from a juicy piece of half-trodden excrement or several dozen stray butts, should the mood strike.

The nearest recommended coffee shop, if I may progress from talk of dog shit and cigarette butts, was an Australian venture called Silo. Though the coffee was decent, the atmosphere tended towards the twattish, and their configuration of avocado and toast was very nearly inedible, which is rather impressive considering it's avocado and toast. It arrived as a staircase of sliced avocado, two thirds of which had browned, atop an obscured piece of sourdough which, at some point during in its journey from the kitchen to my table, had expired in a tomato relish puddle. The sickly sweet relish overpowered every element except the bitterness of the avocado. I ate the whole thing, if you were wondering; I could live a thousand years and never be the type of person who would send back food in a restaurant. Instead, I channel my rage into little-visited pockets of the internet.

Biggles and the Affections of Children

My words had failed. Unless, that is, I had inadvertently requested silence. Whatever the case, I was being outclassed by my fellow adoptee, an 18-year-old Korean with some competence in the language and a decidedly more kid-friendly brand. But what I lacked in everything other than the ability to fool young children, I made up for in my ability to fool young children. I stopped abruptly in the centre of the gravel path and spun round, revealing, by careful concentration of jacket sleeves, two bone-white forearms. Three stopped with me, curious. I had my audience. Flanked by damp corporate graves, I waved my right hand over my empty left palm. Then I waited. The spectators leaned in to study the still-empty palm, their scrunched faces signalling confusion. I smiled, or managed some approximation thereof, and waved my hand again. Three tiny jaws dropped. As if by magic—because it was magic—a 1-yen coin had appeared in the centre of my left hand.

I'm not especially good with children. Part of the problem, I suspect, is my insistence on treating them as I would an adult, feeling that any deviation in behaviour would qualify as condescension. This might prove an effective strategy if I happened to possess one of those cheery, personable dispositions, the kind that effortlessly engages child and adult alike. But as I've only a reserved, distant aspect, I've long grown used to being gaped at wordlessly from behind the clung leg of a parent. Of course, it doesn't help that I can't really speak Japanese. The youngest, a spirited little thing whose name was frequently intoned reproachfully by his mother, the two syllables landing like gong strikes, was the most adaptable to my presence, and it was with him that I developed something approaching a rapport. But my invocation of magic constituted a breakthrough of sorts. Unlike most actual magicians, I find sharing the techniques behind a magic trick to be more rewarding than the initial deception. And so, mere moments later, I had the three of them dashing about the dead with coins stuck tenuously to the undersides of their hands, ready to astonish the rest of the family.

That family, as I learned from the video screened during the three-hours-plus drive, was the product of a merger between two neighbouring divorcees, each of whom contributed a boy and a girl from a previous marriage before joining forces, as it were, to form a fifth member. My Korean friend and I felt especially like a sixth and seventh as we sat in the backseat trying to eat our rice balls while said fifth treated us like terrain and the remaining four snored peacefully in the boot. The trip, which was undertaken entirely for our benefit, was but further evidence of ours hosts' selfless generosity. Earlier in our stay we had each been treated to a family dinner, mine complemented with homemade plum wine and patiently adapted to suit my vegetarianism. It was all the more humbling considering the paltry price I had paid for the room. The guest house, clean, comfortable and well-equipped, was among the best places I had stayed in, even discounting the advantage of its Totoro-themed living area. Admittedly the location was rather on the remote side, but since I had already explored urban Osaka, and Tokyo before that, I was glad to be nowhere for a while.

During these last days in Japan I drank nothing more potent than green tea (all right, and that one glass of plum wine). This was not so much heroic abstention as mere circumstance: the village that contained the guest house consisted of little more than a supermarket and a bakery, and that little more did not include a bar. With no itinerary to speak of, I relished plodding about purposelessly and losing swathes of the afternoon inside a book at the bakery, which in addition to tall bread provided armchairs and good coffee. Occasionally I ventured into the shrines by the mountain and took photos to one day bore my family with, but mostly I stuck to familiar paths, passing the same agricultural fields, slim houses and barren lots where neighbourhood children played. Invariably I would stop in the middle of the short wooden bridge that led under the train line, and stare at the mist hanging over the stream, and the fishing limbs of bamboo.

The other guests varied in quality but not friendliness. A Canadian I scarcely interacted with offered me a gig in Quebec, or at least the possibility of one, solely on the strength of my ability to have a guitar. Of course, he immediately discredited himself by admitting to having seen Xavier Rudd perform on five distinct occasions. I mean, once or twice you could write off as an accident. But five times? That takes intent. Of more substance were my dealings with a charming Indonesian man and his mother, one of whom slept so noisily I genuinely thought someone was renovating the adjoining wall. But I spent the most time with my Korean friend and a young Japanese woman who was staying there long-term in order to experience village life. She worked in education, in the impressive-sounding field of Sustainable Community Development, and in the evenings after long days she could be found crosslegged in front of a cartoon. With unfailing patience and kindness she indulged my fumbling attempts at Japanese, making me realise how invaluable genuine interaction was in the process of language acquisition. I didn't get terribly far, but I did learn how to say I was a strange person. She nodded without further comment.

The overworked parting card I left my hosts.

Poinko vs. the Volcano

I stared blankly at my watch. After one. In all the excitement of spilling Manhattans across my notebook and quietly hoping I had missed the last train, I had missed the last train. I stepped out into the brisk air, a solid four hours to fill before the trains resumed. Though the arcades had ceased hosting half the planet, there was more life in the streets than I had expected. Maybe a picaresque journey through the wee hours was not such a ridiculous prospect. I paused on a bridge, gripping its chilly railing. Blunt boots, black jacket, wind-tousled hair, I lingered for some time, the canal strolling impassively beneath me, before I arrived, as if by divine providence, at the idea of trying another bar.

Following some cursory research I set myself up in what transpired to be a dreary approximation of an American sports bar. Its sole plus was its span of hours; if I held out here until closing, there would be a negligible wait for the first train. Nestled in a booth with a mug of beer and a basket of all-batter fries, I surveyed the bar's collection of untiring youth and found myself wincing at their gaiety. Old fool. Had I not semi-willed this eventuality, I could have been blissfully face-down on a futon, or greedily consuming umeboshi over the sink at my accommodation. Instead, I was licking grease from my fingertips and glaring at strangers for failing to exalt my existence.

I lasted an hour. The walk isn't all that far, I reasoned, ascending to street level. But it had begun to rain. I trudged with my umbrella to the outskirts of the city, frequently having to duck under shelter to plot my path. The rain grew heavier and my progress slowed. Looking out from under an awning, I ground my imperfect teeth at fate. I had missed the last train in Osaka and not a single thing had happened that would fuel even the dullest of anecdotes, let alone several drawn-out paragraphs. Granted, my strategy for adventure boiled down to sitting on my own in bars and rendering my beer mugs in Biro, but sometimes that was enough.

I set out once more, feeling the cold touch from the darkened bottoms of my trouser legs. Then I stopped. A warm orange light in a second-floor window had caught my eye; in fact, both of them. I could make out a middle-aged woman polishing a glass in a narrow lamplit room and a couple of figures seated at a counter. An external stairway led up to a door, beside which I could see a small sign with a picture of a flamingo on it. Whatever it was, it looked achingly cosy. Well, of course it was a bar. It has probably become obvious at this point that I am essentially just "cataloging the world's seedy bars so as to deliver a user's guide to the bewildered and bemused", as my father puts it. But through the world's seedy bars the cosmos opens up and all of creation is revealed, hunched over and half-drunk and desperately sad.

I considered not going in. Wouldn't I be a conspicuous, unwelcome interloper among regulars? But the deadening rain convinced me. I deposited my umbrella into a pot by the entrance and slipped nervously inside. The room held little more than a counter and a few tables by the window, but the limited space was enlivened by an eclectic selection of pop culture artefacts, some familiar, many obscure. The woman I had seen from the street welcomed me with a kindly smile and gestured towards the vacant seats. As I took up a spot at the counter, I noticed a vintage Yoda figurine hanging in its packet beside the till, giving me the once-over.

I ordered a bottle of Asahi, the only beer they offered, and began my customary sketch. When, a few minutes later, I had completed my masterpiece, a compact young woman on the next seat decided to engage me—as if it had been a viable strategy after all. So rescued from artistic exile, I began conversing in an easy manner I hadn't realised I possessed, even, at one point, pretending I could solve a Rubik's Cube behind my back—and I had to concede that this reality was preferable to the one in which I caught the last train, gorged myself on salt plums and passed out. I failed to record the names of the woman and the bartender, but I do recall that the former's meant 'love child' and the latter's meant 'wings'. Love Child worked at a market stall in town and had not long finished for the day. Wings, I was surprised to learn, had only opened up at 10 pm that night. Guess this was the place to be.

An unshaven man in a narrow-brimmed hat entered part way through my second bottle. He had a wild smile and apparently some familiarity with Love Child and Wings. Ordering a whisky and joining us at the counter, it wasn't long before he took an interest in my presence. I quickly dispensed the usual bits of biography and shifted the questioning to him, asking first his profession.
"I am Poinko," he said.
I was understandably puzzled.
"Er, what's a Poinko?"
He apologised for his limited English and beckoned me to wait. For a time he looked as if he were attempting to conjure the right words through sheer intensity. Though it is true that most people in Japan are not fluent in English, I have been consistently impressed by the efforts people made to communicate with me, whatever their proficiency. Certainly no one's English was as poor as my Japanese.
"You know Docomo?" he said finally.
"The phone company?"
"Yes! I am Poinko for Docomo."
Love Child leaned in to show me her phone, amusement dividing her face. I observed what I can only describe as a mad-looking chicken puppet thing. It had googly eyes and red circles for cheeks and a goofy, gaping beak, and it stood before a Docomo logo.
"I am Poinko," said the man again, grinning.
Due to communication difficulties, I was regrettably never quite able to determine if this man had created Poinko, operated Poinko or merely thought he was Poinko. If he hasn't succeeded in dying and I happen to meet him again, I will get to the bottom of it.

More details emerged, often in unexpected bursts. He had recently turned 60. He was a Yakuza. No; he had a Yakuza face. Then he began to describe an island. Its name was unfamiliar to me but from his attempts to detail its location I placed it somewhere in Southeast Asia. He said he wanted to go to a particular volcano there, a volcano that was still very much active. A hiking pack fixed to his back, he would trek across the dark grey earth, climbing through streaks of hot smoke until he reached the crumbling lip. And he would stand there, somehow numb to the bludgeoning heat, and he would jump. No; this was not suicide. He would not jump. He would take out a 1-litre bottle of sake from his hiking pack and he would begin to drink from it. And he would drink until he could no longer keep his balance. With enough momentum he might penetrate the lava. More probably he would dent its surface and remain buoyant, his yellow feathers bursting into searing flame, his goofy plastic features blazing off his face.

He explained that he was 60 years old and it was time for him to cease being an annoyance to others; indeed, to cease being. A return to nature, he called it. He spoke with disarming geniality and not a hint of self-pity.
"I am crazy!" he announced suddenly. He laughed and threw back his glass.
"I'm crazy too," I said, raising my bottle.
"Me too," said Love Child.
"Me too," said Wings.
Though we diverged when it came to volcanoes.

In fact, the volcano idea turned out to be Plan B. Plan A was less poetic: euthanasia in Washington, D.C. under the Death with Dignity Act. Based on a quick review, I can not see how he could possibly qualify. But he would always have the volcano to fall back on.