Day 7 - We’re going all the way, ‘till the wheels fall off and burn

Distance travelled: Vilnius to Riga, 295 km Soundtrack: Bob Dylan "Knocked Out Loaded", "Empire Burlesque", "The Bootleg Series Vol. 1", Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" Easy-paced trip. They don't really do motorways in this part of the world, and the speed limit in Latvia is actually 90 km/h. It's 130 in Lithuania, but that was only half the trip. For the most part I was travelling between towns behind trucks on single-carriage roads, biding my time. I found the shitty part of Vilinius, too! There's obviously a left-bank/right-bank thing going on with the river. The Old Town is on one side and the Financial District on the other, and that gives way to commercial/industrial areas, and then horrible, horrible, Soviet-era blocks of flats as far as the eye can see. Yeuch. Riga is very very nice, though. It's really interesting that these cities seem so Mediterannean, somehow. It's not as though it's warm at the moment - sort of 18-20 degrees - but it doesn't feel like a cold-climate city. You sort of have the idea that these places will be a bit grim, or at least grey an imposing, being that they're ex-Soviet. But they're actually very, very pretty and quite Riviera-esque. Riga is perhaps not quite so Monaco as Vilnius, but it's still very young and hip - and of the two I think I might prefer it here, it seems more genuine. What's interesting is the amount of English that gets spoken, though. You'd think that the Baltics would be all speaking Russian to each other, or would find some sort of other common language, given that they used to be the same country not so long ago. But it was explained to me that the three languages, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian, are actually very different from each other and no one really wants to learn Russian universally for loads of different reasons, so English it is - and it's not just because of tourism. My Estonian friends that I met last night were doing everything in English with the locals. Lots of thinking and talking about Russian influences, Russia versus Germany, cultural and national identity and how that works in my tiny little Australian mind last night. This stuff is sooooooo difficult to wrap my head around. The cultural and historical legacy of being taken over by empires left right and centre throughout your history, and not even having your own country until 1990 really is a bit of a headfuck. As I explained last night, I guess the only thing I can think of from my context is our Aboriginal story, and the idea that what was theirs became ours, and was changed forever under their feet. Onto Estonia today, where I'll probably have a few days off. Will be glad for that; being in the saddle all the time is definitely a bit tiring.

Day 6 - Vilnius

Distance travelled: 103km Soundtrack: Bob Dylan: "Infidels", "Oh Mercy". Oh Mercy has some duds, but it's a really great album. Even though I've made it my own and listened to it loads as an adult, it calls to mind a specific memory of Dad; October 1989 when we travelled through the UK as a family, and the album had just been released. We heard it non-stop in the car! So Vilnius is a completely different city to Kaunas. I'm really glad I came! It's really, beautiful, is very clean, modern and chic, and is one of those places where everyone seems to look about 25 an is driving a Merc. A complete contrast to the Polish cities I was in only a couple of days ago, and certainly very different to Kaunas. It seems very wealthy and prosperous as well, which makes me wonder why I know so many Lithuanians from my work in Görlitz, who earn next to nothing for the privelege of being tortured and yelled at. The hotel is kind of fiddly and annoying, though - one of those places with "character", which calls to mind goofy middle-aged beardy men who begin to get on your nerves in about 30 seconds after meeting them. It's themed with English-speaking writers, most of them British, and it's decked out in a vaguely Edwardian way, so it's sort of "fussy", and could do with an upgrade. I chose it because it was cheap and because it said it had sound-proofed rooms (singing!) but the room they put me in was anything but. I had a quick word with reception and hey presto - upgrade! Can't say it's that glamorous though, there's a jacuzzi which is something I guess, but it still looks like a B+B from the sixties, somehow. I will never understand why the world hasn't caught on to the idea that this "tally ho" idea of middle class Britishness isn't complete myth, and/or is really fucking annoying. I guess it's helped opened doors for me being an English speaker, but shit if it doesn't piss me off. It goes with that particular brand of Brit, somehow - culturally conceited with very little to show for it. Look at me! I'll remind you every five minutes where I went to school and university, and I have an entirely contrived accent that will have you climbing up the walls in no time.... Bah. I don't mean to be mean-spritied, but seriously, it does really give me the shits. Dicked about for quite awhile in the afternoon, sang, and then had my customary long walk. Very, very impressed with the place - see above! So much so that I broke my intermittent fasting schedule and stopped for a meal. Surf and turf, which was unfortunately a bit disappointing for what I paid, but there you go; I've been subsisting 100% on hotel breakfasts alone so far, so splashing out once or twice isn't going to break the bank. Feeling like I'm definitely on my way now. I'm..... somewhere else, and in a different sphere. That's cool. Tomorrow: Riga, and my 37th country. Will be curious to know what that's like.

Day 5 - Travel Day

Distance travelled: Warsaw to Kaunas, Lithuania - 423km

Soundtrack: Bob Dylan “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, “Saved”, “Shot of Love”, “Street Legal”, Singing teacher’s feedback (better), 2nd Test commentary from England versus the West Indies

So here I am in Lithuania.  Country number 36 that I’ve visited, out of a possible 193, depending on what counts and what doesn’t (look up CGP Grey’s YouTube video “How Many Countries Are There” for reference, and no I can’t be bothered linking).  First impressions of Kaunas weren’t that great care of a fairly ordinary hotel with a room that wasn’t too far away from belonging in a youth hostel, complete with shitty internet to boot.  Thought I might stay here two nights, but my wife insisted that I go on to Vilnius, and the internet clinched it for me.  Ain’t got no time for that shit, although I’m struggling with it right this very moment.  Went for a lengthy walk and stopped for a beer later on and got a better feeling for the place, but I do hope that Vilnius might be a little more interesting.

It was a long journey today, through lots of small towns on B roads again.  In and of itself that’s fine - I loved it yesterday - but after awhile I was keen to just kinda get there.  It seemed like all the way up to the Lithuanian border my journey was flanked by a motorway being built beside the road I was on.  Large scale, tearing out big corridors of countryside type stuff.  Poland is obviously on a big economic push (or was - we’ll see what happens with Covid) and is trying to make itself more accessible for freight and trade.  

I’m moving through all the Dylan albums.  Somehow I haven’t managed to include “Blood on the Tracks” which is a major, major oversight, but I still have 25 others to listen to.  The evangelical period is actually quite listenable, and good for a journey.  A common thread or theme when you’re contemplating your innermost being and have a target in mind (the destination) means that the persuasive, Gospel-esque language works quite well.  Dylan does a good rock song, too.  Shot of Love (the song), Solid Rock and The Groom’s Still Waiting At the Altar are all good tunes, and there others like them.  Street Legal, on the other hand, is rubbish.  There are maybe two good tunes in there in The Changing of the Guard, and Señor (Tales of Yankee Power).  The rest are very forgettable, if not downright annoying.  

Felt a bit lonely today, particularly after I arrived.  I guess that’s the idea, though.  I’m not doing this to be entertained.  Going for the walk helped - there’s a very long strip in Kaunas with what looks like an Orthodox Church at the end of it.  I had my beer near there at the end of my walk.  

I’m not going to come out of this transformed or anything.  It would be fanciful to expect that.  I think it’s sort of a bit Zen Buddhist, somehow - I’m emptying my head of distractions and seeing if what I find is fertile ground for moving forwards.  When I think of short and medium term plans for when I get back home, they don’t seem bad, though.  I think that’s a good sign.  I have needed this time, though.  

Day Four - Poland is scary

Distance travelled: Wrocław to Warsaw: 365 km

Soundtrack: Bob Dylan “Planet Waves” and “Slow Train Coming”, 2nd Test commentary of England versus West Indies, my singing teacher giving me (very bad) feedback via Skype, sometimes nothing at all.  

There’s something a bit weird about this place.  I find it kind of unsettling, on all sorts of levels.  Two walks book-ended my car travel today, and they were both a bit..... strange.  The car journey wasn’t straightforward either.  

The walk in Wrocław was pleasant enough.  I found the opera house, which is a very nice-looking old building quite reminiscent of the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg.  Did a quick lap of that, took a photo of a church or two and kept moving.  Found myself in the middle of a very big, very empty square, with a very modern, expensive-looking building at the end of it.  It turned out to be the concert hall; obviously recently built, and probably with a vast amount of EU money by the looks of it.  Might bookmark it as a place to do some work at some point, if things take off the way I want them to.  Went about 200m back towards the hotel and the car though, and found myself in the ghetto.  Yikes!  Horrible Soviet-era blocks of apartments that looked like they hadn’t been paid any attention to since they were built.  

This stuff is weird; on the one hand there are these massive edifices of glass and steel that seem to shout “hey, look at us and how successful we are”, but you only need to walk 30 seconds in the other direction to see the most unattractive and depressing evidence of the contrary.  And this is pretty much in the middle of town.  I mean, every city has its ugly points, but it’s pretty uncommon to find them so central.  Wouldn’t you want to do something about that if you could, instead of spending what must have been BILLIONS on a fancy new concert hall?  Or at least find some sort of middle ground, build a slightly less fancy hall and upgrade the social housing too?   

There was also the slightly eerie feeling from the square.  It was very modern too, but you got the feeling that nasty things had probably gone on there.  This is Poland after all, so..... think demonstrations being horribly and violently suppressed.  On multiple occasions.  

The journey was strange as well.  I had bit of trouble getting out of town, the streets are not well-paved or marked and everything’s a bit chaotic.  Got on the motorway though, which was magnificent (again, it seems to be something that is paid a lot attention to here), but then got thrown a bum steer by my SatNav, which kept giving me exits too late.  A crazy storm broke just as I missed the last one and the heavens opened, as I got sent onto all of these B roads.  I thought it was only going to be for a little while, but it was a good 80-100 km worth, I think - although funnily enough it actually gained me time rather than lost it.  And I was driving through lots of little villages and towns, sometimes on terrible roads that were half sealed.  And sometimes the surroundings were achingly beautiful, and sometimes really horribly ugly; sometimes obviously really wealthy, and sometimes really poor.  It was an interesting journey, and obviously much more than being on the motorway would have been.  I got the feeling that I saw more of the real Poland that way.  

Got back on the motorway eventually and made it to Warsaw and my hotel.  Did my best to address some of the short-comings of my previous day’s recorded singing practice in what I hope was a better session, and then went for the second of my two walks.  

Warsaw’s weird, man.  And kind of unsettling.  It’s like there were some very big ideas had here that were never completed, and you’re walking around in the remnants of someone’s long forgotten dream - one that you know you wouldn’t have wanted to have been a part of.  Everything’s either half-done, or magnificently, powerfully and imposingly done, but stood in the middle of a wasteland, like someone painted a masterpiece and no one thought to build a gallery around it.  There’s the same modern versus run-down feeling here too, and everything’s enormous.  I’ve felt that way around Soviet-era architecture before, it can be very off-putting.  Like there was a very deliberate attempt to demonstrate that the state was bigger than the individual by making all the buildings, and particularly the official buildings, absolutely enormous, to the point that you’re hopelessly dwarfed by everything.  

And of course there are long shadows of violent pasts.  I don’t know my Polish history as well as I should, but I know it ain’t great.  Some nasty shit went down in this city, you can feel it - even if you don’t already know it.  I went for a one-hour walk and found the place utterly, utterly fascinating, but I know I could never live here.  It’s..... spooky.  No wonder all the Polish people I know seem have PTSD somehow.  I would too if I was them!

Off to Lithuania tomorrow.    

Day Three - Shore Leave

So - distance travelled: Leipzig to Görlitz, and then Görlitz to Wrocław: 214km + 168km = 382km total

Time spent: 10:30 - 20h

Average speed: very, very slow

Soundtrack: Bob Dylan: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline, New Morning, Desire and part of Pat Garret and Billy The Kid (I’m trying to do them in order, although I just realised I missed The Times They are A-Changin’), Tom Waits: Swordfishtrombones 

Well, it was a great day, but it started with absolutely and most definitely the worst traffic jam I’ve ever encountered.  I mean - it wasn’t even a traffic jam.  We just sat there.  For an hour.  People were walking their dogs!  I passed the time by messaging my wife and surfing the net, when the net worked.  The rest of the time I just listened to Bob.  Which was great.  I felt no discomfort at all, beyond the guilt about keeping the engine on to keep the air conditioning running.

When I we got moving again I switched from Bob to Tom, and and again, surprised myself about how familiar I was with Swordfishtrombones.  Good Lord, what an incredible album that is, and surely like no other.  And of course I was familiar with it - I had forgotten that Dad gave me a copy of it in 1995!  That’s 26 years to explore every corner, nook and cranny, and I was absolutely obsessed with the title track for a good while, and with good reason, it’s pretty amazing.  I discovered a new track today though, in Shore Leave:

Well with buck shot eyes and a purple heart
I rolled down the national stroll
And with a big fat paycheck strapped to my hip sack
And a shore leave wristwatch underneath my sleeve
In a Hong Kong drizzle on Cuban heels
I rolled down the gutter to the Blood Bank
And I'd left all my papers on the Ticonderoga
And I was in a bad need of a shave
And I slopped at the corner on cold chow mein
And shot billards with a midget until the rain stopped
And I bought a long-sleeved shirt with horses on the front
And some gum and a lighter and a knife
And a new deck of cards with girls on the back
And I sat down and wrote a letter to my wife
And I said baby, I'm so far away from home
And I miss my baby so
Well, I can't make it by myself
I love you so
And I was pacing myself
Trying to make it all last
Squeezing all the life out of a lousy-two day pass
And I had a cold one at the Dragon
With some Filipino floor show
And I talked baseball with a lieutenant over a Singapore sling
And I wondered how the same moon outside over this Chinatown fair
Could look down on Illinois
And find you there
And you know I love you baby
And I'm so far away from home
I'm so far away from home
And I miss my baby so
I can't make it by myself
I love you so

Shore Leave (repeat)

I can remember a friend with pretensions to be a writer getting obsessed with what amounted to a Tom Waits beat poem quite awhile ago.  I have had my moments with Frank’s Wild Years and The Crossroads (which has a story that dates back to my teens), but didn’t pay a great deal of attention to Shore Leave.  I guess we find - or re-find - songs at the right time, because Shore Leave is sort of what I’m up to now.  I’m a long way from home, I don’t really know what I’m doing, I can’t make it by myself, and I miss my baby so.  

I feel for the protagonist, here.  He seems - like so many of Tom Waits characters, like a pretty flawed guy that probably has any number of skeletons in his closet, and if he’s being honest, things about his past and even his present that he’d probably like to shield his “baby” from.  But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her.  Or that he really doesn’t feel like he won’t make it with out her.  There’s probably some bits and pieces in there about wondering whether he deserves her or if he’s being as honest as he should be with her.  Or even if he feels like she should be shielded from all of that, which is..... why he’s buying cards with girls on the back and going to Filipino floor shows a long way away from her prying eye.  He seems like a man with some guilt to make up for, and some conflict to deal with.  

Anyway: I listened to it five times today.  It’s a great tune.   

Day Two

Leipzig again.  Thought that I would be more tired following what I assumed would be a hard slog in the car the day before, but see above (below?) about how easy a journey it was.  I probably didn’t need the rest day in the end, I could have very easily kept moving and been in Poland by now.  

Bit frustrated by consequence; being in Germany doesn’t really feel like I’ve got started yet, I’m still on familiar ground, communicating in a language I understand.  I even ran into someone I knew in the afternoon!  Pretty hilarious - a music contact with whom I’ve always been friendly in a peripheral kind of a way.  She and her husband are planning exactly the same sort of journey I’m on in a week or two as well only longer - they’ll be going into Scandinavia, which was the original plan for me, but I decided to shelve that for next year.  

There was practical stuff today, too.  A financial advisor who has been looking for my business rang and had a chat with me.  I did some singing.  Spoke to my wife.  Sent a couple of emails.  I could have been just around the corner from home.  I did visit the Thomaskirche though, where J.S. Bach and Felix Mendelssohn worked, and took a selfie or two by their statues.  I’ve sung a truckload of their work and would have told you that Bach was the be-all and end-all until quite recently (and it’s not as though I still don’t think he’s pretty awesome), so that was good to do.  I visited the Bach Museum later on too, which was good to tick off.  Looking at his family tree, it would seem that all his relatives going in both directions were called either Johann Christian or Johann Christoph, by the way - family reunions must have been really confusing.  

I’m going Poland tomorrow.  I’m visiting an old stomping ground first in Görlitz, which is right on the border of Poland and Germany.  I have been there many many times and it was the scene of many a misadventure so there’ll be a fair amount of nostalgia and regret there.  I didn’t actually mean to put it on the itinerary, but I decided on Leipzig as a stop-off into Poland instead of Berlin because I’ve been to Berlin so often, and to get to Wrocław from Leipzig you pretty much have to go through Görlitz.  

I worked for far too long for far too little in Görlitz, for a really pretty despicable director.  The friendships and relationships I had there were complicated too, and some of them didn’t end well.  There is a mixture of shame, regret and nostalgia about the place, but also satisfaction that my career has moved on from needing to be there.  But, me being me, that makes me sad, too.  I don’t always deal with letting go well.    

I didn’t mean to put it on the schedule, but maybe it’ll be a really important part of the trip - to show me what I was, what I don’t want to be, and that I’m moving on to something else.  A quick trip down memory lane, a coffee with a friend, and then onward.  We’ll see.   

Day One

Travel day. Dortmund to Leipzig.  Distance: 418 km

Time spent: 15h to shortly before 20h.  

Average speed: approximately 100km/h (I guess)

Method of travel: black 2015 Mini Cooper S Diesel: “George”.  

Soundtrack: Bob Dylan “Another Side of Bob Dylan”, brief moments of “Shot of Love”, cricket commentary from the 2nd Test of England versus West Indies, followed be “John Wesley Harding”, “Blonde on Blonde” and “Highway 61”.  

A surprisingly easy journey.  I just drove right across Germany, easy as you like!  I’ve had far worse journeys that have taken a lot longer - various trips to Berlin and Munich that always ended up in terrible traffic jams, stress, and fatigue etc.  This was nothing like that; a bit of pissing about in NRW, but on the whole remarkably smooth, and I really enjoyed it, surprise of surprises.  Having the music really helped.  After the slightly bitchy start I came across the BEST GODDAMNED ROAD EVER BUILT in the A38 heading into Leipzig too, and the rest was just heavenly.  If tarmac could be art, this is it.  It certainly puts NRW to shame, where putting your foot down is a juddering, uneven chore.  This red-tinged, achingly flat and smooth motorway runs for miles and miles, and despite thinking that I would be Mr Sensible and keep everything at 130km/h or below, she whispered “make love to me” at around 16:30, and who was I to refuse?  I averaged between 170 and 180km/h for a good hour and it was GLORIOUS.  Only in Germany!  

The car: George is a good car, and I’m realising that more and more.  The only thing I don’t quite like about him is the automatic transmission; it gives a slight homogenised, less active feeling.  But I love how for a “small” car he’s actually pretty powerful.  He could do with a bit more “oomph” from around 120 - 150 km/h, but that’s what you look for in a more performance-oriented car, and I might see what I can do about that in a few months’ time.    

The soundtrack: it’s a funny thing, I thought I’d get more out of it, as far as listening to Dad’s music would go.  But I realised that even though I hadn’t heard a lot of it lately (not really by design, it was due to my old mobile having such a pitiful amount of space, so no room for music) that a lot of his music became “my” music well into adulthood, and I had forgotten that.  I know a good deal of it by heart!  So it didn’t really put me into much of a nostalgic mood the way I thought that it might.  Dylan is awesome though, give or take a bit of shrill harmonica playing, and a few of the earlier songs being a bit..... I dunno - sophomoric?  Unsophisticated?  Terrible words to describe arguably the best singer-songwriter that ever lived, but not every genius is a genius all that time, it’s clear.  

The hotel: pretty good.  A bit of messing around in check-in which everyone hates, but it’s definitely of good quality.  Enjoyed a “Vesper” in the cocktail bar after check-in, and am looking forward to the breakfast tomorrow.  

Conclusions: a good day.  Didn’t reflect, plot, scheme, or change the world in my head as much as I thought I might, but there’s a long way to go yet.  Definitely a good start though, and I’m very glad I’m making the trip.  Might change the format tomorrow and expand on a few things rather than boiling everything down to categories.  

The Alan W Memorial Tour

My father died last year.  It has been...... quite a thing, as I guess it is for everyone when they lose a parent.  My situation is made somewhat more complicated for lots of reasons though, being that I lived on the other side of the planet from him for some seventeen and a half years before he died, and that he was actually my adoptive father.  He was my mother’s second husband and adopted me at the same time that they got married.  I had zero contact with my biological father from the ages of about two through sixteen, so when I talk about fathers and dads I definitely mean my adoptive father, being that he was the man that brought me up.  He’s also the only man I would dream of calling “Dad”.  It’s complicated, and I might get into some of the whys and wherefores of all of that over the next few weeks; we’ll see.  In the interim, go and watch Jerry Maguire with Tom Cruise.  It’ll help provide context.  

Dad died at the tail-end of a tour I had in Australia, just before I was about to head into a really hectic period singing in an opera in Cologne.  After the opera finished, things got very complicated with legal stuff, and then Covid hit.  There has been..... a lot on the table since he left us, much of it related to him and much of it not.  As many of us have  (I guess), I’ve been putting out a lot of fires lately, and I’ve wanted to spend some time on my own thinking about him, listening to his music, trying to come to grips with his legacy (financial and otherwise) and what sort of a man I want to be moving forward in his absence.  My life is going to change hugely in the next few months, I’m not allowed to work anyway, and it seemed to me to be a a good time to spend some time alone, go on a long-ish journey, and think.  The subsequent posts will be the results of that.