To the Ends of the Earth

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostel Coastal B&B, Puerto Natales. 18.48.

I know I’ve found somewhere absolutely desolate when I hear myself throwing the word “beautiful” around like a flail. And that just about sums up Puerto Natales. Desolate. But breathtakingly beautiful in its desolation.

Wind the clock back. I’ve had comfier flights. The journey down to Puerto Natales via an hour’s layover in Puerto Montt was perfectly smooth, but I’ve not yet recovered from the debilitating impact of a fourteen hour flight in an air-conditioned box, so my eyes and nose were streaming all morning. To add insult to injury, my ears clogged up upon landing in Puerto Montt, which was less painful than a nuisance that it was impossible to ignore. It was some relief when the last of the new passengers had found their seats and the plane was up in the firmament once again.

I did, however, get my money’s worth from the window seat. Chile’s Lake District is nothing short of spectacular. Think Cumbria if you will, but on a much, much grander scale, where the lakes are larger than cities and the mountains are merely supporting characters for the real stars of the show: the mighty snowcapped volcanoes, rising up and out of the earth in perfect wintry cones. Some of them were gently smoking from their summits; others forced the clouds to crest their peaks like waves, adding a further sheen to their majesty. This place is very high on my list of options for the last week – if I can only find a way to get down here overland, that is. I think I’ll have done quite enough flying by the time I get back from this cold corner of the world!

After Puerto Montt, the world below disappeared beneath the clouds for all of two hours. It was only upon the final descent, mere minutes from the tiny landing strip, that the snowy wastes of Patagonia finally appeared. If Santiago felt like Spain and the Lake District looked like England or even Canada, this is something else entirely. I have no yardstick for this kind of world. Not even Poland in the grip of midwinter comes close. The indescribable vastness of it all, scored with cross-crossing tracks and frozen ponds, appearing and disappearing at will beyond the snow clouds… it’s almost eerie.

Landing was no small feat either. The captain had to pull up out of the descent just moments from touchdown due to fierce winds, the likes of which I have only read about in books about this place. The ancient explorers called this land Tierra del Fuego after the many fires lit upon the shore by the indigenous Selk’nam, but Tierra del Viento may be a more appropriate moniker – this corner of the world seems to be ruled by the wind.

I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to get from the dinky little airport into town, but that question was answered quickly by the local transfer shuttle service advertising itself loudly in the arrivals lounge, and at $5 for door-to-door service, they’re practically giving it away.

It would had been a shorter service had the driver heard me correctly and taken me to the Hostal Coastal and not the Hostal Austral, which whacked another twenty minutes onto the trip and gave me a proper scenic tour of the backwaters of Puerto Natales. I suppose it doesn’t help that the two words sound similar, and I can’t blame the driver for defaulting to the one that is actually in Spanish. But this B&B is wonderfully homey, if a wee bit of a trek from the centre (we’re talking the minutes, tops, but it’s enough to make me reconsider going out in the cold and the dark for supper).

Puerto Natales is immediately a very different world to the rest of Chile. Even our layover in Puerto Montt had many of the same birds flying by as can be found in Santiago. But not here.

If check-in hadn’t taken a little while, I could have practically fed the chimango caracaras that were perched on the fence outside. I went searching for them later, but a family of fishermen spooked them off. It was a shame, but it was just as well – none of my photos came out right anyway as it was getting very dark. That’s why I came out to look around, really – to get my bearings and play around with the camera settings so that I’m not caught out if we should be so lucky as to find any pumas over the next few days.

Apart from the caracaras, the wildlife here is much more like what you might find in Antarctica. Imperial shags bobbing on the water in the bay and sinister-looking dolphin gulls with their dark feathers and red beaks. White-eared grebes sharing the shoreline with upland geese, steamer ducks and… what the?

That’s right, the guidebooks aren’t goosing you. Puerto Natales hosts a herd of Chilean flamingos during the winter months. Quite why they come here, to this dark and desolate corner of the world, I can only guess. Perhaps it has something to do with the legendarily rich Humboldt current. Either way, they are a decidedly strange sight: a mass of crimson and salmon pink in an iron-grey Antarctic sea.

I think I’ll call it a day there. My ears were rescued until the captain had to do that emergency manoeuvre and now they’re right back to how they were before. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had some kind of Eustachian Tube Dysfunction, only the last time it ended in a burst ear drum and three bizarre and painful months of diplacusis dysharmonica. That’s why I’m not trying to force my Eustachian tubes open by the conventional methods. With any luck, they’ll heal in time.

A good night’s sleep would be nice – I didn’t get much last night because the five Brazilians in my dorm decided to turn on all the lights just before midnight and have a jolly conversation at full volume about their respective cities. They didn’t get the hint until they left for the club, and when they did, the chap from Rio decided to ignore his alarm at four in the morning, so the fellow in the bed above him had to creep out and switch it off. At least, I think that’s what he did.

But now I have a room to myself for five nights. Bliss! I intend to make the most of it. Starting with a good kip. Tomorrow is another day. BB x

Another World

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Hostal Boutique Merced 88, Santiago de Chile. 16.15.

Now here’s a setup I really didn’t see coming. This time yesterday I was sitting in a living room in a comfy suburb of Santiago de Chile, some twelve thousand miles from home, knocking back a Corona Extra and watching Spain take on Belgium in their quarterfinal game. Twenty-four hours later, I’m in downtown Santiago, resting my feet for a moment after climbing up Cerro San Cristobal to see the Andes once again. If you’d asked me where I’d be and what I’d be doing at this stage of the summer back in December, it wouldn’t have been either of those scenarios, that’s for sure.

I must have been absolutely exhausted yesterday, because the last thing I remember is sitting down on my bunk bed and checking the time, which was about 18.50ish. The next thing I knew, it was dark outside, the numbers on my phone’s home screen had morphed to 03.10 and a man in the bunk above mine was snoring loud enough to rival an Amazonian thunderstorm. Maybe that was what woke me up. Either way, I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I whiled away a couple of hours trying to work out what to do with the last week.

Of course, I didn’t realise that my adaptor was too big for the sockets here until my phone was down to 3%. Fortunately, the giant in the bunk next to mine (seriously, he must have been at least 6’6”) had exactly the same charger as mine, so I sneakily put my phone to charge and waited for about an hour for it to juice up just enough to guide me to a ferretería in town.

Thus armed (and breakfasted) I detoured back to the hostel via the Parque Forestal to see what I could see (after all, I did bring the lens with me). A couple of Harris hawks kept putting the local pigeons to flight with their noisy circling, and I tried and failed to catch one of the park’s firecrowns as it flitted from flower to flower at blinding speed, but the austral thrushes were absolutely everywhere – and they were much less camera-shy.

They look a lot like the Chiguanco thrushes that were all around Cusco. Come to think of it, they don’t look all that different from the American robins of Central Park, in the right light. They’re clearly a very Santiago kind of bird. I guess I’ll be seeing more of them over the next few weeks.

I hadn’t really planned what to do with my day in downtown Santiago. Honestly, I had expected this week to be spent exploring the Lake District to the south, saving Patagonia for the end of the trip, but the guide I have hired is only working July this year, so I had to change my plans.

Santiago sits in a giant bowl, ringed on almost every side by the snow-capped peaks of the Andes. One finger of those lofty peaks stretches almost as far as Santiago’s heart. Crisscrossed by cycle paths and two very popular cable-car lines, the Cerro San Cristobal was just too great a temptation. As a rule, if there is a mountain nearby, I usually try to climb it. So that sorted out my plans for the day in one go!

It’s quite a climb – about an hour and a half up the eastern slope – but it does offer tremendous views of the capital city and its famous skyscraper, the Gran Torre Costanera, the tallest building in South America.

You can also appreciate the smog, which is really quite something.

I’m still tuning into the soundscape here, but three weeks in Peru have made the job a lot easier. I know a hummingbird now when I hear one, so it was fairly easy to find firecrowns on the way up – though they were nigh-on impossible to photograph, as hummingbirds so often are. One sound I did not recognise, however, was a strange owl-like call coming from the scrub. Merlin came to the rescue: it was a California Quail. I have wanted to see one of these enigmatic little things since I first saw them in Bambi as a kid.

California quail just isn’t the right name, though. They’re clearly quaver quails. Just look at the musical note embedded in the head of this dashing young male. You tell me that this handsome fella doesn’t deserve a musical name for wearing such a showy headpiece!

Speaking of showy headpieces, this tufted tit-tyrant was a nice find near the summit. For most of the morning, I could hear some kind of tyrant species high up in the trees, but this one came right down to eye-level and stuck around for a little while.

Santiago definitely looks better when you’re facing to the east. From the Cerro, the view out west is buried under a thick cloud of smog which seems perpetually fixed just above the horizon. The shape of the valley is part of the problem, trapping the exhaust fumes in a natural bowl, but it is something I’ve never seen the likes of before. I suppose I had better get used to it, as next year is likely to see me accompany some of my top public speakers to the world championships in Shanghai, and China is no stranger to smog.

Right at the very top, there is an enormous white statue of La Virgen de la Inmaculada Concepción, and at her feet, a small sanctuary. This seems to be the spot the locals make for in the afternoon, presumably to catch the sunset, as it was getting very busy by the time I reached it. Most of them doubtless made the ascent by cable car, as the lines to get tickets back down were just as big as they had been at the bottom. Foolishly, I still had my camera set to low-light shooting after my run-in with the quails, so when a buzzard-eagle appeared out of nowhere, I was woefully underprepared. I got off a few clean shots, but as it was close enough to see the glint in its eye, it was one of those encounters best left to the naked eye.

It didn’t get the same reaction from the crowd of sightseers that the condors did back in Peru – but then, Andean condors are twice as big and five times as heavy, so they really do command one’s attention.

I’m no less impressed by the Andes than I was when first I laid eyes on them. They really are the most impressive mountains I have ever seen, dwarfing every peak I have had the fortune to behold until now. Imagine growing up in the shadow of these mighty walls of rock and ice… Little wonder the Inca thought themselves divine!

My phone is nearly charged back up. Looking at the time, I think England have just set out against Norway in their quarterfinal game. I can’t watch or even follow the game on the radio thanks to the BBC being regionally locked, so I’ll just have to go for a walk and see if I can find anywhere playing the game en route. Could be a good excuse to take myself out for dinner, though I doubt I’ll do more than grab an empanada from a stall somewhere.

This time tomorrow I’ll be in Puerto Natales. It looks like Patagonia had its first snowfall last night. I can’t wait to see the snow again. It’s been too long! BB x

A Surfeit of Films

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Las Condes, Santiago de Chile. 10.50.

After a flight that seemed to go on forever, I have made landfall in Chile. Tomás, my host for the next four weeks or so, very generously offered to come and pick me up from the airport – an offer I found it impossible to decline, operating on about an hour’s proper sleep and six hours of sleepless shut-eye.

Being right at the back of the plane meant that I was the very last customer served dinner, by which point they had run out of everything but chicken. I hadn’t eaten much, so that was fine by me – I thought it was really top-notch, by plane standards (or any standards, for that matter). The film choices were fab too, once I’d worked out where to plug in the complimentary headset (hint: it’s in the armrest to your right). I watched The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (largely on fast forward, as I’d had it on my mind a few days prior), considered Avatar III: Fire and Ash and then changed my mind and opted for Michael, the biopic about my all-time favourite artist that I had somehow managed to miss in cinemas this summer. I’m not normally a fan of biopics, lumping them somewhat unfairly under the same “cash-grab” category as Disney’s recent slew of remakes, but I thought this one was genuinely moving. Then again, I adore MJ and his music, so that’s probably my own bias talking.

I still managed to watch a silent version of Avatar on one of the telescreens in the row in front. It looked almost identical to the previous two films, boiling down to a sequence of who-took-who-prisoner and Eywa saves the day again, but maybe I was missing something without the dialogue.

I also managed to watch The Batman before landing in Santiago ahead of schedule at 7am this morning. That’s around six or seven hours of films, plus another six trying to get some sleep – and that’s still not the entirety of the flight time. That’s an indication of just how long the journey to Santiago is. Thank goodness it was all in the dark!

It took about an hour to get through customs, largely because the immigration control was very busy for seven o’clock in the morning. I had a gut feeling I’d be assigned to Gate 13 – unlucky for some – which I was, some thirty minutes later, only to find that Señorita Allende at the control desk was writing her next novella for each customer, so the queue for Gate 13 moved at a snail’s pace. I was two clients from the desk when she put on her coat, packed her things and signalled to the rest of us that her shift was over and to find another gate. The man at Gate 12 was much more efficient: a quick glance at my passport, a stamp (yay!) and through.

I was stopped at customs, which was an interesting change, because of the marmalade I’d brought over as a gift for Tomás and his family. I’d forgotten how much of a fuss is made of preserves! They let me through without a fuss – and with the marmalade, amazingly – but maybe next time I’ll stick to chocolate.

First impressions of Santiago? I’ve barely got to know the place, but from a single drive across the city to my host’s home in residential Las Condes, it’s a very different city to Lima or Arequipa. It feels instantly more like Madrid or Barcelona in its architecture, with its tower blocks and its vast network of underground highways. A dense wintry cover of cloud is currently hanging over the city, shrouding most of the snow-capped peaks beyond a grey veil, while the thick layer of smog that hovers above the city was immediately obvious upon leaving the airport.

It feels decidedly weird leaving England with a tan and a t-shirt, getting on a plane to somewhere abroad and immediately having to throw on a jumper and some warmer socks. It’s also a positively balmy 17°C here, a point emphasised by the faraway screeching of monk parakeets, an invasive species in most European cities but just as native to this strip of South America as the puma and the condor. It’ll be even colder down south in Patagonia. I hope my winter gear is warm enough!

I’m giving up on trying to catch up on lost sleep. It’s not working, and probably dangerous to try, or I really will throw my sleeping patterns right off. I’ll get a proper night’s sleep at the hostel I’ve booked in downtown Santiago tonight, after getting my bearings and catching the Spain v Belgium game, of course. Until then, let’s take it slow. Don’t want to burn out before I’ve even started my placement now! BB x

Retreat from the Heat

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London Heathrow Terminal 5, London. 20.00.

So far so good! I hit the exact hurdle I expected at check-in – namely, Iberia failing to allow for middle names and slapping them on the end of my surname, making for one heck of a name – but the lady at the desk waved me on in without a fuss. My suitcase is off on its merry way, and in another half hour or so I’ll leave this charging station and set out after it.

It hadn’t really dawned on me quite how far a fourteen-and-a-half hour flight truly is until I saw it printed on my boarding pass. That’s an odyssey of a journey right there, and all of it in the dark, being one of those nightchaser flights that seemingly travels backwards in time.

My contact in Santiago has got in touch, so I no longer need concern myself with my suitcase once I reach the other side of the world – and that really is a load off my mind! I have an aisle seat at the very back of the plane, so I can’t guarantee I’ll have slept all that well by the time we arrive. I hope they have a decent film or two on tap! I’m conscious that I’m missing the France/Morocco quarterfinal as I write, but maybe it’ll be showing in one of the bars en route to the C Gates.

The news here is all about the heat – that, and Nigel Farage’s impending by-election against Count Binface. There are so many reasons I would move abroad – not least of all the number of colleagues who tell me (in the nicest possible way!) that they don’t think I belong here – but when it comes to political satire, we really are the best in the world. Where else would a would-be prime minister be forced to spend the summer debating against a man with a bin on his head?

Enough of this madness. Onwards! To a country of wonderful wine and breathtaking mountains where they speak my grandfather’s language. The forecast is eternally in flux, but it now looks like it’s set to snow throughout my stay in Puerto Natales. Strangely enough, it will be the first snow I’ve seen in nearly two years. I hope I have packed enough for the cold! BB x

Overencumbered

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Carriage B, Delayed 16.05 to London Paddington. 18.07.

No adventure ever worth setting out on ever started easily. That’s what I’m telling myself as I lug all of this junk across country. I have to face the facts. It was my decision to maximise my time in Chile, leaving a single day’s pit stop in the UK before setting out again for Greece. Both occasions require formal wear, but Chile is in the grip of deepest winter and Greece will be just past the zenith of its summer fury. It felt decidedly odd packing my quilted coat, gloves and rain gear when the temperature was ticking past 31°C outside, but I have to be prepared for any eventuality. I really dislike traveling with anything more than a few changes of clothes and a backpack, but on this occasion I have no choice. Thankfully, I don’t have to lug my Greek summer wear around Chile. It’s just getting all of this junk out of Somerset that’s the kicker.

It’s pretty hot out there. The corridor is full of suitcases and a pram, most of them belonging to a retiree in a summer dress. I wondered at first whether she was a candidate for the most inattentive grandmother on the planet, since she only popped out into the corridor to check on the inhabitant of the pram twice over the space of an hour – until at last she scooped up the little thing, which turned out to be a little brown puppy. She proceeded to try to encourage it to drink from a metal bowl of water – most of which went onto her dress and the floor – and then took it into the toilet cubicle, picking up super absorbent puppy training wipes from her pram en route. The Japanese family trapped in the corridor with me seemed more than a little bemused.

We were delayed again outside Castle Cary by a fire at the side of the track, which appeared to have started some five or ten minutes ago, judging by the speed of its advance and the trail of charred grass it had left in its wake.

Fires starting at the side of railway lines? Two heatwaves back to back? I’ve never known a summer like it. The sooner I am up in the air and down in the southern hemisphere, the better. I may have Spanish blood, but on this occasion the Englishman in me wins out. I’m really not a fan of this kind of heat.

23.03.

Check-in is officially open, but the website is telling me it’s “too early” to check in, despite the fact that this time tomorrow I’ll be one hour into my fourteen-and-a-half hour flight to Santiago. It’ll be something to do with the fact that it’s British Airways operating the flight out, not Iberia, and Iberia’s website usually forces me to input my middle names as part of my surname, since middle names don’t exist in Spanish society (but two surnames are expected). One of those two usual stumbling blocks.

I’m too tired to deal with it now. I’ve packed a proper headrest cushion for the journey, as it will be the longest flight I have ever been on in my life, so if I have to check in at the airport and get a rum deal as seats go, I guess them’s the breaks. At least I have Friday and Saturday to readjust! BB x

Waiting

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The Flat, Taunton. 23.30.

Still no word from Chile. A voice in my head is trying to tell me that something is amiss, but I’m tempted to chalk that up to institutionalisation. I have to remind myself that I knew next to nothing about Villafranca de los Barros when I set out to live and work there for the best part of a year. I didn’t even have my accommodation thought through until a few days after I had arrived. There is simply a lot less stress in the way the Hispanics go about these things, and I should be on board with that – it’s the system I started out with. I wonder whether it’s just a psychosis of the English (or, perhaps, the Americans) that we need everything planned and sorted right down to the last detail.

I am not a planner. Sure, traveling twelve thousand kilometres without much of a plan might be reckless even by my standards, but it doesn’t trouble me. Not really. After all, if the worst comes to the worst, I can always store my luggage somewhere and go traveling.

England is back in the grip of another heatwave. This one isn’t as fierce as the last one, but it is noticeably hotter than usual. Perhaps I’m noticing that all the more because A) my barber’s has always been busy when I’ve gone by, so my hair is longer than usual; B) the fan in my air purifier has given up the ghost; and C) I’m packing for an austral winter, so I’ve had the odd experience of going through my winter wardrobe in 30 degree heat. The incoming El Niño may alter the weather in Chile while I’m out there in ways I cannot predict – it could be hotter, wetter or even colder than the average winter – so I have to pack for every eventuality. Thank goodness I paid for a suitcase this time around! I really hate traveling with suitcases, but at least it gives me the peace of mind to pack enough supplies to keep me comfortable, whatever the weather.

Just a short couple of posts for now – I don’t have an awful lot to report on. Just wanted to get back in the zone before the next adventure begins. Writing is an exercise, and like any sport, it needs a good warm-up! BB x

Against the Odds

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The Flat, 19.20.

Well. That totally did not pan out the way I expected.

Image credit: BBC Sport

I’m not really one for football. When my students ask me what team I support – as boys can be relied upon to do year after year – my answer is a slightly evasive Real Betis, but to be honest, that’s only because of my fondness for the city of Sevilla and the Andalusian colours of its uniform. I couldn’t name you any of their players, nor have I ever watched any of their games.

The World Cup, however, is another matter entirely. Living and working in a boys’ boarding house pretty much demands an investment in the ups and downs of the world’s largest football competition, and with so many underdog teams defying the odds and Mr Trump meddling directly in the politics of the game, this one really has been one to watch.

When England blew past the Democratic Republic of Congo last week to secure a place in the last 32, I’ll admit, I didn’t fancy our chances. Playing vainglorious Mexico on their home turf, and in the high-altitude Estadio Azteca, no less? I really thought it might be a hard-fought but richly-deserved win for El Tri. Watching Judge Bellingham score not one but two goals within the space of a minute was electric here at home, so I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like for the small battalion of England fans in the stadium, surrounded by an army of Mexicans in green and white, looking for all the world like Cortes and his Spaniards outnumbered by the Aztecs. I have to admit, by the end of the game, even this dyed-in-the-wool Hispanist was rooting for his home country. It was genuinely one of the best games I’ve seen in a while. I’ve always held up El Clasico as the gold standard, but after the last two Madrid/Barca games I watched ended in 0:0, this year’s World Cup has been a serious breath of fresh air.

Image credit: BBC Sport

I’m actually quite excited about the fact that I’m going to be in the Americas for the grand finale. Granted, Latin America’s involvement in the World Cup has come to an end with their defeat against Kane’s team: the rest of the games are in the unforgivingly tight grip of North America. However, Argentina and Colombia are still in the game, and in a matter of hours, we will know whether Spain or Portugal has made it through to the quarterfinals, so there is hope for the Spanish-speaking world yet. In a World Cup that has been shared with Mexico, that is not an insignificant detail. Given that I will be in Latin America for the next month and a half, it would be pretty electric to see one of the Latin teams make it all the way to the final.

Chile has rodeo, which is a sport I’ve always wanted to see. However, since I’m going in winter, I don’t think that’s something I’m going to achieve in my trip this time. I wouldn’t say no to some kind of sporting spectacle, though. It still surprises me to hear myself say that, but then, I guess my job must be rubbing off on me – and in a good way. It can’t hurt to be a little more open-minded. BB x

U-Turn

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14.02, The Flat.

In the blink of an eye, my second year at Taunton has come and gone. It’s been another hurricane season, I won’t deny that. A little easier than last year, perhaps – if only because of the repetitive nature of teaching the same course – but every bit as busy. Since September, I’ve taken my student Funk Band out to their first external gig, joined a band of my own, taken a team to the Oxford Schools Finals Day for the second year in a row and led a public speaking workshop in the form of a legal practice (which, of course, I am totally qualified for…). I have returned to Extremadura under iron skies, taken yet another school trip to Barcelona and travelled all the way to Peru in search of the Andean condor on one of the most amazing adventures of my life. I have not found Her – Somerset is proving a very dry place – but I have made some good friends at work, which is a positive. I haven’t exactly had much time to commit to the search, and I have also spent almost every day of my holidays on the road, which is terribly self-indulgent of me, but it is how I survive the manic 24/7 existence that is working in a boarding school.

True to form, my summer holidays are set to follow the same trend. After a few days’ reprieve – just about enough time to tidy the flat and pack – I will be traveling across the Atlantic again, bound this time for Chile, nearly 1,500km further south than where I left off in April. Please don’t get me wrong – this one isn’t a purely self-indulgent adventure. I’m off to work at a school out there in Chile’s capital, Santiago, for three weeks or so. As to what form that work may take, I am still completely in the dark. I imagine any rational human being might balk at the idea of being less than a week away from traveling to the other side of the planet at no small expense without so much as an address or even the vaguest idea of what to expect, but I’m at that stage of my life where I am entirely my own agent and any change is welcome. The alternative is a rather static Somerset summer, alternating between driving lessons and debilitating bouts of hayfever. With my timetable for the next academic year allowing some time for the former, I think I can allow myself to dodge the latter by switching seasons in a Spanish-speaking country.

I won’t be hiding under an austral snowstorm all summer. When my five weeks are up, I’ve a wedding to attend in Athens, which I have been looking forward to for a very long time. Once again, I’ve only planned the beginning. How I get home after four days in the Greek capital remains up in the air. Maybe I’ll find a quiet spot in Thessaloniki and soak up the Mediterranean sun while I work on my novel. Or maybe I’ll travel back home across Europe, seeing Romania like I planned years ago. I haven’t decided yet.

I really don’t know what the next two months will bring. At the very least, I hope they bring change, whatever that looks like. My boss would really like me to stop saying yes to everything. She means well, I know. But if I don’t say yes to things like this, my youth will slip through my fingers and I will find myself in the same job ten years from now, still hoping that She will appear. The apps don’t work – everyone is exhausted – so, like a good scientist, I have to go and do the fieldwork. I don’t expect to find Her in Chile (let’s be honest, at a distance of nearly twelve thousand kilometres, it would probably be better for me if I didn’t), but it can’t hurt to try – and along the way, it would be nice to make some new friends and learn something new. I have work to do, of course – this Spanish Language A: Literature course won’t write itself – but with several long flights on the cards, that shouldn’t be a problem. With one “buffer” week on either side of my placement, I should have plenty of time to explore.

In short, I don’t know how this ends. I don’t know how it middles either. But I do know how it starts. Since I’m going all the way to the far side of the world, I figured I could go a little further. Before my placement begins – the day after the FIFA World Cup Final – I will be indulging my inner Attenborough once again in the desolate wilds of Patagonia. After a little shopping around, I’ve found a respectable guide who will take me in search of one of Chile’s most magical creatures: the puma. I didn’t have any luck with the jaguars in Manu this Easter, so hopefully Patagonia will deliver.

I hadn’t planned on going back to South America so soon – but here we are. Life is full of u-turns, but they aren’t always as exciting as this. So here’s to the summer of ’26! BB x

Heatwave

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The Delayed 14.29 to Taunton, Reading. 14.51.

England swelters under the glare of an unseasonably ferocious sun. For the second day in a row, the temperature is pushing well into the thirties. It’s all the news can talk about. Trains are running slower due to speed restrictions, three children have “gotten into difficulties” while bathing (a tactful way of avoiding the potentially triggering d-words associated with fatal water incidents) and the whole of the South seems to have jumped into the car and carved out a four-square fiefdom on Bournemouth Beach.

I’ve hopped out east to pay my mother a visit, and in so doing stepped right into the hottest part of the country – bar London, of course, which is usually a couple of degrees warmer than the rest of the island. England is rather pretty in May, though she wears her best dress in the first two weeks of the month, when the flowers are still fresh and the wind is cool. Now, the early summer sun is at that particularly British angle where it’s high enough to burn but low enough to blind, and the heat feels more like the first week of August than the last week of May.

Retreating before the summer’s wrath, I have sought solace and shades along the banks of Hampshire’s rivers.

England is at its most beautiful wherever a river can be found. Crystal waters running over gravel, with shadowy trout and grayling darting from sunlight to shadow. Clumps of weeds and watercress wafting in the water as though in the wind. The trailing arms of a weeping willow gently tracing the water’s surface. Iridescent dragonflies of every shape and size – dragons, damsels and darters – hawking from bank to bank, playing a longer game than the mayflies, whose inert bodies drift downstream, their twenty-four hours spent. Chiffchaffs, wrens and blackcaps singing from the trees, the lazy purr of an overheated wood pigeon and, now and then, the explosive song of a Cetti’s warbler from deep within the darkest heart of a reedbed or thicket.

When I am traveling far from home, this is the image of England that I miss most of all.

Did you see the pike in that first picture? Don’t worry if you missed it – they are master ambush predators. Go back and see if you can spot it.

This corner of the River Alre passing through Alreston is supposed to have otters and kingfishers, but I was over the moon to see a pike. They were always my favourite fish when I was a lad, and it’s not hard to see the appeal for a young boy: fully grown, they’re huge, sinister, almost crocodilian monsters with soulless eyes and fins that move so slowly that their every twitch seems calculated. A perfect killing machine. Hardly surprising for a fish that outlived the dinosaurs, whose ancestors prowling Cretaceous rivers were not all that different from the river monsters that lurk in reedbeds outside Tescos and Sainsbury’s.

I can see why adventurous young lads might get a kick out of fishing up one of these ancient beasts, but I’m just as happy spotting one drifting between the weeds. It makes a change from chasing chiffchaffs through the branches of the tallest trees.

I’m racing home now, clearing the green fields of the Vale of Pewsey under a mercifully cloud-studded sky. I acquired a few books in a second-hand bookshop for a couple of pounds and a new sketchbook for a little more. I’ve been meaning to get my hands on the Horrible Histories books for a while, since they had an enormous impact on my art and my love for history and storytelling. Everyone seems to remember the enormously popular TV show (which, for my sins, I have never seen) but the books appear to have faded into collective oblivion. I dare say Martin Brown had more influence on my pen-and-line drawings than any other artist – besides the legendary Chris Riddell, of course.

Power’s running out. I’d better stop typing and leave enough juice on this thing to get me through the ticket barrier at Taunton station. See you around! BB x

Wilderness

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The Flat, 18.41.

The preacher stands at the pulpit with a smile as bright as the sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows behind him. He does not look the type, dressed in a blue hoodie and an oversized black baseball cap with the word “King” emblazoned in white capitals upon its front, but there is no mistaking the fervour of his faith when he speaks. He sees me, a newcomer, take a seat toward the back of the church and introduces himself immediately. He makes a point of singling me out for a special welcome in the introductory prayers. Half of the worship is in song form. They’re easy enough, but I recognise none of them. There is a testimony from one of the congregation, a passionate sermon on the theme of Pentecost, the partial revelation of a prophecy and one last unfamiliar worship song. As the service draws to a close, the preacher offers us the chance to come up for prayer – the laying on of hands. I feel it may be targeted at me and I briefly consider staying behind. It isn’t shyness that changes my mind – I am not the child I used to be – but a sense that this isn’t the place. As I leave, the preacher races to the door to bid me farewell. He must have moved fast; I could have sworn he had his back to the congregation when I got up to leave.

He has done all the right things to make me feel at home. But he cannot contend with the empty chairs and empty tables. Ruefully, I concede defeat, and cross another option off the list. I am seeking my generation, church by church, and struggling to find them.

I am thirty-one years old, Catholic, and looking for a spiritual community around my age in Somerset – and not having much luck. I am in the wilderness. The search for a church continues.

Since moving here a couple of years ago, I have flirted with the idea of having a church of my own. I left a friendly community behind when I left my last school, though by the nature of it being a school-based religious community, I was rather hoping that striking out somewhere new might give me the chance to meet others my own age in a setting removed from work. As ever, it seems, I have been swimming against the current of my generation. While the millennial salmon run crowds the concrete streams of London, I have ventured downstream for a change of scenery – so it should have come as no surprise that all the young folks I might have hoped to meet are long gone. On my head be it. However, I had hoped that the church might provide.

Sadly, this is not the case. I have tried quite a few churches around Taunton now, and everywhere I go it is the same story. A handful of young families – children under ten – and a slightly larger gathering of pensioners, but no middle line. In many cases, more than half of the congregation consists of immigrant families, who seem to be keeping our churches in business with their comparatively strong belief. The demographic that sits somewhere between twenty and forty, however, is nowhere to be found. They aren’t in the Catholic Church. They aren’t in the Anglican Church, and they aren’t even among the evangelicals. Where are they?

The simple answer, I suppose, is that they aren’t in Taunton. My friends in London and Edinburgh had larger and younger communities in their churches, this much is true, but those are the capital cities of their respective countries, so I feel they may be anomalies. The struggle I face here in Taunton is, perhaps, merely symptomatic of a far greater spiritual decline across the country, and my generation – with whom I have always been at odds – seem to have been leading the exodus all along.

I should preface this with a home truth or two. I am, by all accounts, a pretty poor Christian. I sin, I don’t go to church on Sundays and I don’t lead a Christ-centred life. I draw more strength from my prayers to the Virgin Mary than I do to those I make to Jesus, since I associate her so closely with the wellspring of light that is El Rocío. I am no evangelist, having a fierce aversion to the belief that there is only one truth, and I certainly don’t hold by the idea that salvation is a concept reserved for God’s chosen. In that sense, I am just as guilty of picking and choosing with the scriptures as the next man. However, in spite of these contradictions – and contrary to so many my age – I choose to believe. I have my doubts, of course, but I choose to believe precisely because I doubt. That is why it is called faith.

I wish I had others my age I could bounce these ideas off, but they are proving hard to find. While I worked at my previous school, I was living inside a bubble – but out here, in the real world, the faithful are on the retreat. A recent survey conducted by the Pew Reseach Center found that the UK now ranks among the top seven countries globally where no religion holds sway over the others, with the number of people identifying as Christian down from 71% in 2001 to 46% in 2026. In the past, most of us simply ticked the “Church of England” box on such surveys because we’d been baptised, whether we were practising Christians or not. These days – quite reasonably, I might add – there’s a lot more people questioning why they have to identify as something which has no meaning to them whatsoever.

The trouble is, for hundreds of years, going to church on a Sunday has never been about deepening your faith for the average Joe. There have always been more sceptics than true believers, I am sure, and for every prayer sent to the heavens over the last two thousand years, there must have been at least two or three sideways glances. What the church did provide – what it still does provide – is community. It takes a village to raise a family, as the saying goes, and at its best, the spiritual community generated quite naturally by a gathering of the faithful must have been a family like no other.

Which is why, every time I enter a new church, it breaks my heart a little to see all those empty chairs, and the front rows occupied only by the elderly, as though the gift of faith comes included with one’s pension and bus pass at the age of sixty-five.

I must confess myself a hypocrite at this junction. Spiritual growth has nothing to do with age, and there is much I could learn from my elders. But my heart longs for a community of kindred spirits, and my career in education only makes that longing for contemporaries all the keener. I spend six days out of seven and seven months out of twelve working with people less than half and more than twice my age. In much the same way that babies forge instant connections with others of the same age whom they perceive to be equals, it would be nice to meet some people of my own age for a change.

Where have they gone? Why have we traded away something that was once so central to our world? Everywhere I look in the news, it is all of woe. Frustration and rage against the situation in Israel and Palestine and the role of religion at its heart. Mental health concerns on the rise. Young people (like myself) exhausted with modern dating and struggling to find partners, despite there being more options than ever before. A generation obsessed with the way that it looks. A generation obsessed with itself.

I imagine I would have more luck finding people my own age if I joined a gym, since that seems to be the altar at which the millennials worship. But I cannot, will not set foot in one of those places. I have never been much of a sportsman (understatement of the millennium), but while I recognise their value in keeping an increasingly industrial community healthy, I fear for their impact on our children. Unchecked, they can twist a person’s self-image beyond recognition – and, sometimes, they can distrort the very person themselves. The idea that we might have traded a free community based around love, faith and spiritual growth for a subscription-based hall of mirrors unsettles me deeply.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with a healthy fitness routine – you cannot look after others unless you look after yourself, after all. But by throwing out God, the Church and the community that went with all of it, we have left ourselves with nothing but our own autonomy – and that is not all it is cracked up to be. We are sociable animals by design. To deprive us of that is, in the words of John Wyndham, “to maim us, to outrage [our] nature”.

I am speaking to the void. There is nobody here who can temper my spiritual ennui. And that is precisely the point I am getting at. But I will keep searching. I must. She may be out there, it is true, but she is proving hard to find, so before I find her, I should like to find a community with whom to share my faith.

The current is fierce. The tide is coming in and the dry land around my feet is receding, I know. But I remain hopeful. Hope, as ever, is my polestar. I will find you someday, I swear it. BB x