And I'm on my way!

21/11/2023 21.08 I’m at the ferry port in Portsmouth waiting to get on the ferry and leave the country for 'A Year Away Trying Not to Leave the Ground'. (Brazil first stop, via Spain and Tenerife). I’ve just spent my last £3.18 of UK money on 3 memory banks – a crunchie, a cadbury’s dairy milk, and a wispa - for the 3 women I’ll be meeting in Santander all of whom have lived in England and two of whom grew up here. I feel I’m actually getting on my way now. I’ve had a wonderful last three weeks of visiting friends and saying goodbyes, which culminated in a completely fabulous fundraising dinner and cabaret, with musician friends performing (a baroque trio, a Klezmer trio, my neighbour’s daughters doing a duet, the Lancaster city community Klezmer band playing Klezmer dances that I called, and my friend’s band singing songs about historic revolutionary Lancastrians). And the food was spectacular – my niece has been running Sanctuary Cookalongs, a cookery project in Preston for asylum seekers and refugees, and she organised a Syrian couple and an Iranian woman to come and cook mujadara (bulghar and lentils), Syrian baklava, and the most amazing Iranian salad that looks like a birthday cake, and aubergine dips individually arranged in little shot glasses ... around ten of my guests told me it was the most beautiful looking AND best tasting food they’d EVER had.

 

We raised £895 for my three ‘causes’; to help to publish environmental journalist Dom Phillips’ book, "How to Save the Amazon - ask the people who know!" - the book he was writing when he was murdered in Amazonia in June ’22 along with indigenista Bruno Pereira, a Zambian Chibombo water project in partnership with Whalley Range Climate Action group, and Sanctuary Cookalongs, the group who came to cook for us.

On Sunday we had brunch in the cohousing common house, and Fereshteh the Iranian chef made a gorgeous vegetable omelette as our contribution. My sailing (and Senior Learners Programme) friend Janet had stayed over as had Jen and Fereshteh, and my friend Gill (who I’ve known since my very first day in my very first ”job”, as a Community Service Volunteer working in Stockport Social Services with mothers’ and toddlers’ clubs in 1978) drove over later. So we sat around chatting till it was time to go to the Dukes for ‘The Invention of the Other’.  This is an award winning film about contacting the Korubo people, featuring Bruno Pereira, by director Bruno Jorge. Bruno Jorge had planned to come over to speak at our Amazon conference in 2022 but on the weekend of the conference he was in Brasilia with Bruno’s widow accepting an award for this film. I'm wondering if I need to understand Derrida talking about 'the Invention of the Other’ before I can understand this film. Some of the Korubo people had been forcibly contacted some time back and had become separated from their people many of whose family had been killed by the Matis people. They went back in an expedition led by Bruno Pereira, with Jair Candor (who many of us had seen in Bruno Jorge’s amazing fllm Piripkura, and who had joined us in Lancaster over Zoom for a live discussion after the film last November along with the co-director Mariana Oliva) to see if the remaining member s of their tribe were still alive. 

I look forward to discussing this film next week in our regular Monday teatime Amazon zoom discussion group (we’;ll be holding another next week Monday 27th November, and then maybe one on 19th December, and maybe one in January, registration link is : https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvc-yrqTsjGdfsaxQ1zQXCD0nAjHp8izgM (NB the link won't be available for a couple of days) 

It's now Wednesday..... and I'm still inspired to write! 

On Monday morning, a friend came round for a little sendoff, I tore round the house sorting out clean bedding and spare bedding for people who are going to be staying in the house till my tenant gets back in the New Year, sorted the bins and the compost, did a laundry load of bedding and hung it up, emptied the fridge, did one last admin job (sending a list of Hannah Frank sculptures stored at the old people’s home in Glasgow to the director of the care home management company for their insurance, that he’d asked me for back in April I think!), had lunch, packed a couple of last things, and.... wheeled my bags down the pedestrian street to meet my neighbour Liz who was going to be taking me to the station.... to be greeted by maybe 20 other cohousing neighbours who jumped out of the Mill building behind where the car was parked to wish me a fabulous trip! The photo is their reaction when Liz said ‘show how you feel when you think of Fiona being away for a year’ – lots of lovely happy faces – but that is a nice friendly joke, and it was a wonderful extra surprise.

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Liz drove me to Lancaster station, where I also bumped into Santi Rothschild, one of the longest standing members of Lancaster’s Jewish community of which I’d been secretary for the previous 15 years or so.... she gave me a big hug and wished me well, and Liz came down to the platform and helped me onto the train. On the train I got a lovely call from Mandy, a fellow Halton Mill director, wishing me well – she’d missed the ‘surprise farewell’ wave when the others saw me off earlier on. I was only going to Preston, the next stop, at this stage, where I was meeting Will my ex husband for a coffee before the two of us were going on to meet my sister, my nieces and my great niece for a final Italian meal. At my birthday party earlier in the year (where I’d served a Chinese meal for 50 people and we had cocktails and mocktails) my lovely friend and former boss Mary had brought a bottle of Freixenet sparkling wine. I hadn’t drunk it – so I’d taken it with me and we all had a glass before we set off from my sister’s house to the restaurant. 

The food was lovely and the waiter was fun. My ex husband Will spoke to him in his excruciating Italian which made both of them (Will and the waiter) very happy. We went back to the house and had some more Freixenet, then I dropped Will at the station and went back to Jen’s where I was spending the night. I helped her book her travel insurance – SHE FINALLY DECIDED LAST MONTH THAT SHE IS COMING WITH ME TO BRAZIL!!!! (she’ll be meeting me in Tenerife next week)– and we had a long chat before I went to bed. I went back to Lynn’s in the morning for breakfast, and we went in a taxi to the station together. Lynn came down to the train to see me off, which was absolutely lovely. The train was on time and everything worked perfectly except that I had already realised that I had rather too much stuff and couldn’t quite manage it all myself. Hmm. 

In London my best friend from uni, Tina, met me at the station, and we went to Waterloo together, stopping off to do some last minute errands. We met at 1230 or so, and got to Waterloo about an hour later with a plan to have lunch. That didn’t quite work – as there was nowhere on the station that served proper sit down food. We started off with a coffee in Costa, and then we both decided that we were fine as we were, we didn’t need lunch, but what we did need to do was reorganise my luggage. I’m on decaf, I haven’t had caffeine since I was breastfeeding – and my daughter’s now 32! – but she was definitely fed by caffeine. Tina’s an experienced world traveller – when I was pregnant in 1991, she was on a year’s travelling adventure – and knows how to travel light (definitely not one of my skills NOR one of my values). I ordered the second lot of drinks and we started thinking about what I could leave with her. I reluctantly handed over my large and heavy latex pillow, which took up a whole bag on its own – and my beautiful furry grey winter slippers. Then I got on a roll, went to change, and handed her my new black stretch trousers – very good for winter weather in the UK, not very practical in tropical Brazil – and my leopardy tshirt which doesn’t go with anything and which doesn’t breathe when I run. I also changed from my light trainers to my walking boots, and my luggage felt much lighter and much more manageable. 

She let me keep my goggles, and I made the case for both my melodeon AND my concertina. I’d spent the last three months trying to decide which musical instrument to take with me. I’d specially bought a Lilliput melodeon for this trip – they are tiny instruments which were made during the second world war for the German soldiers to put in their knapsacks, and come with their own case. And I’d also acquired a new case for my English concertina. The problem is that I’m a melodeon player – I can busk if necessary, do solos, join in anything, and perform, well, on the melodeon. However, it’s a restrictive instrument that only plays in the keys of G and D (and maybe the related minors B and E, and the key of A if you stretch yourself a bit). Which means that for Klezmer, and for anything else in any other key, it. doesn’t work. 

I’d learned to play my friend Jo’s English concertina nearly forty years ago when we both lived and worked in Geneva. Jo sublet a flat across the road from my office, and I used to go there every lunchtime and practice the concertina. Twelve years ago I’d started to get more involved in Klezmer music, and had acquired a fully chromatic English concertina, a deal set up by my friend Katie in Suffolk, as a kind of ‘adjusted swap’ for a beautiful green handmade Eric Martin melodeon that I’d had specially made for me twenty years earlier in Britanny.  It was hard to let it go but worth it for the pleasure I’ve had playing the concertina over the last years.   The problem is that I’m not very good on the concertina – I don’t practise nearly enough (that should actually read ‘I don’t practise’) – which means that if I want to present as a musician, I have to have the melodeon – but if I want to play with anyone else, I have to have the concertina. She could see my point and allowed me to keep both instruments. 

Tina's  last act was to seize my woolly hat and gloves that she said I wouldn’t need. I have a big sailing jumper that I thought i might need on deck of this ship at night, that she let me keep. Maybe I should have given her that as well. We are both looking forward to meeting up at the end of my travels, all being well, when I’ll collect all these things and laugh about how I never missed any of them. I went to Boots and bought a perfectly good tiny blow up travel pillow as a replacement for the large, heavy latex pillow, and got the next train to Portsmouth. 

Arriving at the station, I asked a woman who was waiting outside, for a restaurant recommendation, and her son told me about a new Mexican restaurant five minutes away that I would NEVER have found without them (the ticket inspector had suggested either a Subway or a Wetherspoons). Feeling adventurous, I invited the mother and son to come and eat with me – they turned me down as she’d just had a hard day at uni and he’d just had a hard day at work. That was exactly the opposite way round from what I would have thought, and I really wanted to know more, but they went home. So I went off to the restaurant on my own, and it was unbelievably beautiful and with a fantastic menu. Having not had lunch, and having just finished a month of Keto, I was VERY happy to order the loaded fries with vegan chicken, and supplementary black beans and coleslaw, with baked plantains and home made coconut icecream. 

This was pretty much the first carbs I’d eaten for four weeks, apart from some Challah (Jewish plaited loaf) on Friday nights – it was absolutely delicious and I resolved to enjoy every meal I have for the whole year, and stop seeing food as an inconvenient fuel. I managed to leave half the chips which shows that eating Keto must have had a good effect... You’re not actually hungry on keto, the cravings come from lack of carbs, and your body gets over that after a few days. So not having had lunch hadn’t been a problem at all, and I had this meal quite early. 

Then a taxi to the ferry port, and here I am! I went to sleep quite late, woke up pretty refreshed at 7 a.m., finished the beautiful book I’d downloaded on my new Kobo after the recommendation from the radio 4 book club last week – Bel Canto by Ann Pratchett - and went for a wander around the ferry feeling unusually ‘light’ and ‘free’. It’s literally the first day for twelve weeks that I haven’t had to do anything for my trip, there are no appointments, and no one wants anything from me. It’s a beautiful feeling – I feel totally comfortable and not at all lonely and worried (for now!) I’ve had lovely chats with a few people – a digital nomad called Chris who works for a sports non-profit and might go on one of the ‘digital nomad cruises’ (like the one I’m going on to Brazil from Tenerife) in the future... a woman who’s going to pack up her house in Spain ready to sell it, as her husband died in July (I think it’s far too soon, personally. I like my mum’s idea of waiting a year before you do anything like that).... and a couple who are on their way to Madrid, then across and up to France and home on the Eurostar, stopping off on the way. 

I thought I was going to have to spend 18 euros on breakfast, but luckily there was an a la carte breakfast in a different outlet that was only four euros for what I wanted – and I found a veggie option quiche and ratatouille for lunch that was only 8 euros. I don’t think the French know much about vegans from what I can see on board this very culinary French vessel, so it’s just as well that I’m not vegan. 

Three hours have passed in a flash, and it turns out that one of the things I’m going to be doing with great pleasure along the way is WRITING ABOUT IT. Obviously this is too long for people to read, but that’s up to you. Hello and a special vote of thanks to those who have read this far.

love, Fiona setting off on an adventure! 

l

at my farewell party/cabaret in a new-to-me dress inherited from my friend Chrissie :-) 

ps if you get this far why not leave a comment?