A three-bird Cockatoo convention visited me soon after I arrived home yesterday, tapping on my window, asking for a conversation. I gave them some nuts, guessing they were down from the fire-affected forests, and they headed off.
Tuscan Retreat
With Brexit still breathing down Britain’s neck, I wanted to revisit a blog I did some time ago, to celebrate the very best of British production, in my view – the Landrover – and how this journey back (together with the journey down) opened up Europe for me, travelling across France and in to Italy.
So many journeys so many memories, to and from London and our place in Tuscany, Italy. Nostalgia? Absolutely, completely. I feel the need to revisit these memories before the Brexit maniacs get their way and destroy what is beautiful and sustainable in Freedom of Movement. The camping grounds I stopped at in France were extraordinarily well-managed, great facilities, and so reasonable in price. It made driving the long hours an absolute joy.
The first trip back to London took me up through Italy from Tuscany up through Piemonte to Valle d’Aosta, which led me (countless times) to les Alpes, driving up over the Great St Bernard Pass (il Passo del Gran San Bernardo) that first time down into Switzerland in brilliant sunshine, at four on a September afternoon. Around Lake Geneva to Lausanne I went, arriving at Pontarlier in the dark. I found a parking spot just outside the entrance to a Péage, heading to God knows where. I was absolutely exhausted. After a night of waking up, dozing in the front seat of the old beast, I shook myself conscious and crawled on toward Troyes (seeing the periphery), going on, then around in circles late afternoon south-east of Paris struggling to discover a municipal campsite. Finally I did, coming upon Méry-sur-Seine, a tiny hamlet south-east of Paris.
I parked on the grass and walked in to the village, got something to eat – do I remember what I ordered? No, but whatever it was it was very, very good. I know that. I walked back and set up my mattress in the back of the beast, extending out over a table top I had made especially with a trestle to support it. With a tarpaulin attached to the roof rack and reaching down and pegged in to to the ground all around, fresh country air flowed in all around me. I slept the sleep of angels. To this day I can’t recall a sleep so sound (maybe one other). It rained all night and I never felt a drop.
Waking up at six I packed up like a single person army on the march. I was gone in minutes, driving around to find the right route north, until I stopped at a café for breakfast, café au lait, a croissant and advice how to drive en direction de Meaux skirting north-east Paris, on through the northern cities. I reached Calais at four in the afternoon. Crossing the channel by ferry to Dover, I arrived home in east London at around ten at night. My old landrover only did fifty miles an hour.
That voyage in 2006 I will never forget. I have done the same trip many times in the years since then, in two separate Landrovers (old and new). My last defender model (2013), took me via different routes, but the first trip from Tuscany in the battered old Series Three has never ever been bettered.
Lee, JFK and Stephen King
It’s tough being a writer in this organised politically-controlled oligarchic world of ours. Publishing is a strategic asset in a stable of assets essential to a well-tuned oligarchic universe. The message, whatever it is, must be edited. That seems to be the last law of the universe, the one Scientists haven’t yet owned up to.
Try thwarting it and you will be edited out of existence says a footnote on the first page of the Oligarch’s Manual. Try beating the system and your Sun will shine no more.
So, I guess even the great Stephen King obeys this largely hidden law of our Oligarchic Universe. (I say great because book sales obviously equate with greatness, right?) It has nothing to do with well-oiled sales machines. Sales = Greatness and vice versa. So, I went, I must say with hope, to read 11.22.63 by the undoubtedly great Stephen King. And what did I find? Well, my mother always said: if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all. But when did I ever listen to my mother?
What on earth was King thinking about?
Not the truth clearly. His novel is fiction, okay I get it. Only he put an awful lot of real people in it as well. Like poor old Lee Harvey. Poor old very dead and much maligned Lee Harvey Oswald. A feckless man and near hopeless rifleman who some people keep saying was guiltier than his own much imagined sin. Lee Harvey Osward with his Carcano Model 91/38 rifle with which he probably couldn’t have hit a barn-door from 100 metres. No, not probably, maybe definitely. The man who somehow reverse-actioned Newtonian physics—with that minor impediment of a tree blocking-out his vision—hitting a moving target from the wrong direction.
From how far was it?
The man who ended in history as being responsible for killing a President. Go figure. Many have tried. I don’t need to debate this anymore. To my mind at least, if Lee were on the sixth floor of the Book Depository that fate-filled day and fated time and was pointing a rifle at the back of the President’s head, he would have had more chance of hitting Parkland Hospital, than as is claimed, he murdered JFK, in the still so far un-investigated—at State Law level—crime of homicide.
The make-believe myth come mystery in Dallas, 22 November 1963.
All now co-signed by bestselling-author Stephen King.
Swimanog 