Purple Skies

August 25, 2017 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

My days left in England are numbered. There’s still a few things I have left to do before I leave for A Year in Villafranca de los Barros Part II, namely tying up a few loose ends at home, finishing as many of the books I bought this year as I can, arranging something resembling accommodation for the coming year and notifying Student Finance of my plans to leave the country for the next few years (an administrative hoop I hadn’t counted on, but one that I have most gratefully been made aware of).

The shooting star that was my last flight with the Northern Lights at the Edinburgh Fringe was still burning as it passed over Newcastle, a short stop on the way home. It was more than I could ask for, to see the north of England in all its beauty. When I think of you, England, this will be my lasting memory: not the twenty-odd years I’ve spent in Kent and Sussex, but the gorgeous sunsets and seascapes of the north. Northumberland, why do you have to be so beautiful?

Even now, as I sit in my Sussex room listening to Janet Jackson’s Let’s Wait Awhile, I can still hear the chattering of the terns and feel the wind on my skin. Under the setting sun the evening sky was scarred all kinds of pink and blue, until the clouds were the closest to a natural purple I’ve ever seen. Apparently, some years you can see the Northern Lights from Northumberland. I hear you can see them in Durham, too, but if a cappella’s not your scene, the Northumbrian skies are just as much a feast for the heart.

I’m currently halfway through Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun. Not my usual taste in literature (I’m a sucker for plot-based historical fiction, preferably with larger-than-life characters and far-flung destinations), but it’s got me hooked. It’s so very enchanting to read a book that deals with fulmars and alcopops in the same breath without a touch of sarcasm, and the struggles between country and city living is something I can really connect with, insofar as a self-aware privileged middle-class male can. One day, I’d love to visit Orkney and the Northern Isles. It sounds truly bleak. And that’s reason enough to test it. For now, Northumberland keeps on giving.

I’m off to Spain in a couple of days for a fortnight’s long-delayed camping and outdoor adventures. This time next week I’ll be somewhere in the mountains near Madrid. That’s quite an exciting thought. If I weren’t booked for a wedding, I’d be walking to Villafranca. As it is, this is just a holiday – my last one before work begins anew in October. The novel awaits, and the last piece of the puzzle lies in the Gredos. It’s time I got a move on. BB x

The Last Aurora

August 19, 2017August 22, 2017 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The wind is howling outside the window. Not a mild summery gale or bluster, mind, but proper banshee-style wailing winds. The ones where you hear shrieks and whispers in the fiercest squalls. Taken together with the dry hum of the lighting, the occasional click and whirr of the electrics and then the dull drone of the plumbing every few minutes, it’s a proper orchestra of silence up here in our Edinburgh flat. The perfect, saddening seal to what is, and perhaps what must be, the last glorious flight of one of the brighter stages of my life.

Everybody’s out or asleep. The post-handover drinks and DMC’ing lasted until the early hours of the morning, by which time yours truly and the usual handful had long since turned in for the night. With the last show over – and a resounding, successful six-in-a-row sellout show to boot – the fantastic fifteen are at their strength’s end. The Northern Lights now go their separate ways. Today was a new beginning for the youngsters, and a promising golden start it was too, but for five of us at least it was the last flight. The coming years may see many happy reunions and moments relived in coffee shops the world over, but somehow I do not think the same Lights will take the stage together again. Because whether we are the same crowd or not, we will all have changed. Time is the master of all things.

Were it not for Biff, loyal and enduring, I would never have known this world. I might never have met Luke, and shared a greater love for Luther Vandross. Or Sam, that most charismatic of leaders. Seb, the rockstar maestro. And though we crossed paths from time to time in the modern languages block, it was chiefly through the Lights that I found a loving friend in Aisha. My heart breaks a little more every time that I remember that I’m letting you go (like I said in Thursday’s Grapevine riff, even if it did fall flat on its face somewhat). But life is, when you think about it, one long string of goodbyes. And for a serial loner like me, I should be well-versed in saying goodbye. Perhaps that explains the lack of tears.
…

Sixteen hours later. Sam’s electric toothbrush is buzzing away in the bathroom. The fridge is steadily being emptied. Four Lights have taken their leave, eleven remain. The fade-out continues, only not quite as harrowing as yesterday’s yellow afternoon. There’ll be plenty of time for reflection on my next adventure, and right now I could do with getting my head screwed on straight vis-a-vis living arrangements for next year. That’s what the next few days are for – that, and a welcome break from a very, very intense fortnight.

It’s time I went in search of a new project. Something that will occupy my heart, mind and soul for the next few years. Books are the answer, and there’s no better place to start than Edinburgh, truly the city of books. A solid hour in a second-hand bookshop off Grassmarket set everything to rights. There’s a word for that feeling of being surrounded by the writings of ages in an old bookshop, though I can’t remember exactly what it is. That is my life, though. I am sure of it.

The morning sun has set on my time in the Lights. The whispering winds lead me forward. Waverley station awaits, the only station in the world named after a novel. There’s a symbolism there, and I’m shamelessly abusing that for a final word. BB x

Stymied by the Laity

August 7, 2017August 7, 2017 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Summer rumbles on. My summer job is over, the Edinburgh Fringe draws near. It’s going to be a tough one, but I believe in my group. It may well be the last time in years that I find myself surrounded by such capable musicians, and I’m not about to let something like a ticking clock get me down. We’ll rise to the challenge, and we’ll do it spectacularly. We’re the Lights – it’s what we do.

Single release next Friday 11/8/17 – excited!

Breaking like the rainclouds overhead, I’ve just vanquished a dragon that has for a long time been lying in wait outside my door. I want to travel. I want to be free. And I want to see the real world, beyond the one put out on display. But for just over a week I’ve been hitting hurdle after hurdle in my preparations. And, like so many episodes of my life, it all centres on Spain.

Four years ago I set out on a mad solo trek across Spain, from Santander to Amería. The plan, insofar as one existed, was to walk from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean. I was eighteen, bored out of my mind on a rather-less-than-successful second half of my gap year and anxious to be free of the shackles of jobseeking or the threat of going on the dole. How that converted itself into ‘I know, I’m going to walk across Spain’ still eludes me. It was just one more of my crazy ideas, only this one I actually carried out.

In a manner of speaking, I succeeded. Armed with little more than a sleeping bag, a compass and a map of Northern Spain printed in 1967, I made the trek, busing some of the more tedious legs, and taking some notable diversions via Ávila and Olvera, before arriving at last at the deserted beaches of the Cabo de Gata. Along the way I almost caught hypothermia in the rainy mountains of the Sierra de Guadarrama, procured a golf ball-sized blister on my heel and slept in forests, olive groves and under a lighthouse on the Mediterranean coast. It wasn’t a very well planned adventure – I came home dangerously underweight and with a face swollen to basketball proportions courtesy of the Almerían sandfly population – but I made it. And it was a real adventure.

Four years on, I’m itching for another shot. Now that I’ve done more research, however, it cuts me deep just how difficult it is to do that kind of thing anymore. Spain is, all bias aside, an absolutely magnificent country, one of the last great frontiers of Europe. But unlike Scotland, Romania or the Scandinavian countries, it’s not possible to just pitch a tent in the wilderness, wild as it may seem. The laws are fiddly, and vary from country to country, but where grey areas linger, the economic strain of twenty-first century Europe has been cruel. Tied together with irresponsible fire-starters and botellón fanatics, the future of free-camping looks bleak. Where there’s money to be made and taxes to be levied, there’s little time for the vagrant – even less so if he or she be so irresponsible a citizen as to be a vagrant by choice.

Beyond my own annoyance at the legal difficulties of wild camping – in my belief, the true camping experience – there’s a darker, more sinister side to this intolerance. How will we ever encourage our children to look away from their screens and rediscover the natural world around them when it’s illegal to let them wake up in the countryside once or twice a year? Televisions, computers and videogames are the present and the future, I’ve no doubt, but in a shrinking world, is it not all the more important to encourage our children to see the real world and learn from it? Five may have had their time, but there’s so much to be said for the joys of a night in the middle of nowhere, far from the bustle and false escape of a campsite.

There are, of course, instances when you can pitch up. People tend to be more accepting of Camino pilgrims doing so. But that’s a privilege only the Santiago lot profit by. What do those who wish to follow the other GRs (gran recorridos, or great routes) of Spain do? Spain is ripe for the wild camping route. It’s just a shame that a country so perfect for walking is so intolerant of camping.

Hopefully without the snow, come September

And so begins my resistance. Come September, before my second post begins, I’m bound for Spain to explore what routes I can. It’s not the same country Laurie Lee traversed when he set out one summer morning, but I refuse to believe the people have changed that much. I’m going storyhunting, and I will not be denied. BB x