Month: August 2024

Longhorns and Lightning

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Tomorrow is the first day of a new life. After a long summer of alternating adventures, up-and-down driving lessons and watching the clock, it’s back to school for this bleeding heart. I’m determined to make a success of it. Once again, I find myself thinking back to my first teaching post in Uganda, nearly twelve years ago – where it all began. Did I know it then? I must have had an inkling – that was partly why I went, to see if teaching was for me – but I suspect I was blinded by the lure of seeing Africa with my own eyes. My lanyard is hanging from the door, my notebook is on my bedside table and the pen pot on my desk – a gift in the shape of a Dia de los Muertos mug – is stuffed with fully-loaded board markers. It’s nearly time to get started. But for now, let’s dive back into the realm of memories; to a remote farmstead on the banks of the White Nile…

9th October 2012
Ugandan Independence Day (50th Anniversary)

One month into our stay in Boroboro in northern Uganda, Luke Ojungu came trundling into the driveway of the Bishop’s compound in his enormous four-by-four. With Uganda on the brink of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its independence from Britain, we had an unexpected holiday on our hands and the former headmaster had offered to take us to stay at his farm in the Apac region to the southwest. The bishop said a prayer to bless our journey and send us on our way with God’s protection, though Luke’s impressive 6’5″ stature might well have been all the protection we needed. His plan? To show us a corner of Uganda we might not see otherwise, and to put us to work herding his cattle.

No visitor to Uganda who makes it out of the capital can possibly miss the famous Ankole cattle. For one thing, they’re everywhere, and for another, their enormous horns make them easy to spot over a great distance. I wonder if that was an intentional bit of genetic wizardry on the part of the cattlemen, so that they could keep stock of their herds from far away?

Luke had several hundred longhorn cattle spread across his lands south of the river, along with a large number of goats and chickens back on the home farm, which by Ugandan standards (or any standards, for that matter) made him a rather wealthy landowner. He was very keen to point out Matthew, the hornless bull he had named after the headmaster of our school back in England. It was hard to tell whether it was an affectionate gesture or somewhat tongue-in-cheek, choosing the one longhorn bull without horns for such an honour, but we had a laugh all the same. A running in-joke was born and Matthew “the most indie cow in the world” and his distaste for anything mainstream kept the four of us amused all weekend.

We arrived in time to help with administering the inoculations, which had already taken a couple of days, what with the herds spread out across the forested hills. Maddie, the team scientist, took the lead on this one, seeing a chance to do a little fieldwork ahead of the Biology degree ahead of her. Several years ahead of the rest of us in maturity and wisdom, if not in age, she was always out in front and seizing any and all opportunities that came floating our way, whether we joined her or not. It was Maddie’s idea to go to Uganda in person to snag a better deal on the national park permits. It was Maddie’s idea to spend all night dancing with locals down the road from our tumbledown hotel in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. I should have followed her lead more often.

Mind you, it was also Maddie’s idea to ride along with the staff to a remote village in the north to the funeral of a colleague we’d never met, even though the service was conducted entirely in Lango (of which we understood perhaps four words between the four of us) and the return journey had me sandwiched between quite possibly the two largest women in Uganda.

With jabs administered, Luke left us in the care of two of his cattlemen, Alphonse and Gideon (I definitely misheard Gideon as Geryon the first time around, since that’s what I wrote in my journal, though that would have been a very fitting name for a cattle herder!). Out in the bush, I got my wish: to explore a proper African wilderness. True, it was grazed by Luke’s hundred-strong herd of cattle, but there were wild things everywhere: drongos, hornbills, cuckoos, parrots and forest kingfishers. Overhead, the awkward silhouette of a pair of bateleurs kept us company across the open marches. In the course of a single cattle drive I counted at least forty species I’d never seen before, jotting down details of what I’d seen and sketching while the memory was fresh.

In short, I’d make a decent Darwin, but a useless cowherd.

The drive took us deep into the forest, which swallowed up the herd quite capably. The going was a little hard, with thorny acacia branches poking in all directions, and we got to wondering whether we were being watched by other, more sinister residents of the forest as we cut a path through the trees: our encounter with a troop of baboons at the crossing at Karuma the day before had left me with a deep-seated awe (and justified terror) of the things, and I couldn’t shake the idea that they might be hiding in the trees, watching us from evil, sunken eyes.

I needn’t have bothered: the great herd of longhorns drove most of the forest creatures before it like a scourge. But it’s funny what gets into your head.

What was waiting for us, however, was a tropical storm. We had reached the heart of the forest, where the bush was at its thickest, when Alphonse brought us to a stop at the sound of a heavy drumroll from the north. Gideon went on ahead to divert the herd, but we had gone no further than a hundred metres when the heavens opened. It did not happen gradually, as rainstorms do in the British Isles, but in an instant: one minute the sky was grey with promise, the next it was sheet-white and bucketing it down. It was as though somebody had turned on an almighty showerhead, the way it just came down all of a sudden, and it went on for the best part of an hour. At Alphonse’s suggestion we sheltered beneath the scant cover of the trees, holding the herd at a standstill while we waited for the worst of it to pass. The waterproof hiking boots which had endured similar conditions in the Lake District were waterlogged within minutes, and we were all of us soaked to the skin – it was hard to imagine that only moments before it had been a balmy thirty degrees and we had been bemoaning having run out of sun lotion. I don’t think I have ever been so utterly drenched. If I remember correctly, I was quite miserable. We all were.

Luke came to the rescue around midday, picking us up from the side of the road when we finally broke free of the forest and saw the Nile, our intended destination, winding across the valley ahead. Regardless of the conditions, it would still have been another couple of hours’ march to the river, and Luke was quite anxious that we would not catch our death of cold on his watch, so we were whisked back to the farm for a warm cup of tea and fresh clothes. Alphonse and Gideon bade us farewell and pushed on toward the river, even as the clouds threatened a second deluge with flash and thunder.

We conceded defeat before these incredibly hardy cattlemen and their herd, and returned to teaching the following week with a renewed sense of purpose: we had a lot more to offer in passing on what we had learned than in wandering blindly through the bush in the wake of men who had been herding cattle since they were children.

I said I was miserable – which, according to my diary, is a fact – but like most things that get me down, I’d do it all again in a heartbeat, if only to see the rain come down as ferociously as it did that day, and to feel that shudder in my heart when the first drumroll of the rainy season came thundering in. Matthew wouldn’t have thought all that much of it. After all, there’s all manner of cliches when one gets to talking of a thunderstorm, and Matthew is far too indie for any of that nonsense. BB x

Moje Sibiř: Magic from the Taiga

/ Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

Back in April, I made a flying trip to Prague to spend a few days with my dear friends Andrew and Babette. I’d never been to the Czech Republic before, so I used the opportunity to see the sights: the statue of Jan Hus, the Jewish cemetery and the tomb of Rabbi Loew, creator of the legendary Golem of Prague. But I was in for an unexpected treat when Andrew took me to see an evening show of Moje Sibiř, a spatial composition centred around the spirit of Siberia. Over the space of 45 minutes and seven movements, Roman Zabelov and his troupe dimmed the lights and carried the audience away into the endless forests of the Siberian taiga by the power of music alone.

Roman led the suite with his voice and his accordion, conducting much of the composition with eyes closed tight in the manner of a shaman weaving some kind of ancient magic. Speaking of spellbinding, I have never seen an accordion played so creatively: it is obvious that Roman is a something of a frontiersman, combining unorthodox techniques with a quasi-mystical, body-and-soul engagement with his craft, like a Belarusian Pan of the Far East. Zabelov’s ensemble, stationed in various locations around the performance space, worked together to turn the hall into something far more intense than a simple performance space. Through a clever combination of ethereal singing, haunting vocals and long, whooshing breaths, it felt as though they were summoning the arctic wind itself into the room. I had to close my eyes for one of the movements and let it carry me away.

The setting might have been showstopping in its own right, with seating arranged beneath the myriad paintings of the Baroque Refectory of the Dominican Cathedral of St. Giles, but a combination of technical wizardry and clever vocal choreography transformed the gallery into an illusory space: shadows seemed to leap from the paintings and follow the echoes around the room, while the heavens above rippled beneath the rusty iron waters of a tundra pool. I might as well have been holding the heart of the taiga in my hands.

Whether or not it was Roman’s intention, I have been spellbound by the idea of Siberia ever since. I suppose it’s the instigator behind my current fascination with the Amur region and its tigers. If it weren’t for the fact that any and all possibilities of traveling out there are off the table because of the current tension between Russia and the West, I might well have been looking into making my own way out there. It’s amazing what a little musical hypnotic suggestion can do. BB x

There are places that whisper and shout. There are places we return to and that we look for all our lives. These places are both real and imaginary, but that doesn’t detract from their reality. Such is My Siberia.
Roman Zabelov

Let Go

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Today is a day for farewells. I caught the early train to London Paddington to take lunch with the family of a former student and two of my colleagues. These are not just acquaintances, no mere ships in the night: these are people who I have shared my work and (quite literally) my world with for the last six years. When the time comes to say goodbye, I usually make a habit of leaving a parting shot in the form of a lengthy card or letter, but I wasn’t in the right headspace today. I’d have probably stayed longer if She wasn’t in town.

It’s been a very long and painful summer. I can’t remember one quite like it. It’s nearly over – thank God – and work, the Great Healer, will soon put me right. But heartbreak is a hard thing to manage when you live alone, far from everyone and everything you know. How do you move on when your heart is still broken, nearly two months on, and your world is at a standstill?

I’ve been reading a lot. I’m working through John Vaillant’s The Tiger at the moment, which deals with a much starker isolation in the Russian Far East than the one I’ve known this summer, albeit much less melodramatic. One quote from this morning’s reading has stuck:

The most important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation. Alone and with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself – who is he really? Because nobody’s watching, you can easily become an animal… […] You can run in fear and nobody will know. You have to have something, some force, which allows and helps you to survive without witnesses.

John Vaillant, The Tiger

After thirty summers I know who I am, and I know my weakness for acting on heart over head. So instead of buying an off-peak return – which would have given me the time to say the goodbyes I wanted – I booked myself onto the 5.30 train home, with no room for manoeuvre. I suppose I wanted to stop myself from doing something rash.

In another universe, I would have watched the sunset from London’s famous Sky Garden with her tonight – my idea of a final goodbye to the city where we met – but in this reality, I must be the gentleman and let her go without another word. So this is me, the dichotomy: the gentleman and the animal, doing the right thing and running away.

My head, for once, is talking to my heart.

My only regret is leaving before I could say a proper farewell to my dear colleagues. I will make it up to them with a handwritten letter this evening. I’ve always been a lot better at conveying my feelings in words written rather than spoken, anyway.

My force – the thing that keeps me going without witnesses – is Hope. Hope that, someday, my heart will heal and things will get better. Hope that these things are sent not just to try us, but to bring a moment of light and happiness into our lives, even if, like a match on a winter’s night – or even a shooting star – that light is followed by a temporary darkness. Hope that somewhere out there is a future where somebody falls for me just as hard as I do for them. Where “sorry” and “thank you” are not our watchwords.

I have not given up on old fashioned romance, and I never will. It is out there, shining, somewhere beyond the stars.

Heartbreak is good for you. It brings you to your knees, but that only makes it easier to look up. It forces you to look inwards and to love yourself again. It reminds you that you were not afraid to love with your whole heart, even if you had no idea that was your intention.

Ride north, Macumazahn, for there you will find great happiness – yes, and great sorrow. But no man should run from happiness because of the sorrow.

Henry Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife

Feeling with your whole heart makes you vulnerable, especially in affairs of the heart, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. Because, hand-in-hand with the gut-wrenching lows come soaring highs, an ecstasy of joy and excitement that is impossible to convey.

I cannot escape it; it runs in the family. My great-grandparents found each other in the middle of a bloody civil war that threatened to tear their country apart, and they held onto each other even as the regime started to eliminate their loved ones for their beliefs. And still they believed.

My grandfather put his whole world on the line for an English girl who captured his heart one summer, risking everything to hold on to the happiness he had found. Would their love have stood the test of time? I will never know – he lost his life in his early twenties in a hit-and-run incident that tore his future apart – but I am convinced that it is that whole-hearted Hispanic passion for life that runs in my veins.

Today is a day for farewells, and I have made mine. The next chapter is about to begin. BB x

The Devil’s Cauldron

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The white IKEA bookcase in the corner of my bedroom holds my most treasured memories: cherished books from my childhood, photo albums fit to bursting and hand-written diaries that stretch back as far as 2012. One of these last, spineless and soft around the edges, features a Van der Grinten map of the world: an eighteenth birthday present from a friend. It contains the tales of my adventures in Uganda, the first teaching post I ever held. As I open it, a handful of photos fall out: a vulture, a much younger me in Kyambura Gorge and the misty mountains of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Memories come flooding back. Come with me down memory lane, and I’ll take you on one of the most breath-taking adventures I ever made.

19th September 2012

According to my diary, it was an early start. My alarm clock woke me up at 3am, and while I was dressed and ready to go, my companions were a little slower on the uptake. Can you blame them? I sat on the concrete porch of the little house in the garden of the Bishop’s residence, watching the stars. There is no night quite like the African night. It is a deeper black than you can possibly imagine in the West: enlightenment has left our world overlit. Without streetlights to pollute the sky, the heavens sparkle with an ethereal light that has not been seen in most of Europe for over a century. I counted more than twenty shooting stars before our driver arrived and whisked us away into the dawn.

The Langton Four – that was what they called us. We were the first student representatives to visit our partner school in Boroboro in the once troubled north of Uganda. There had been staff exchanges in the past, but with the Lord’s Resistance Army waging a private war in the region for the last two decades, the idea of any kind of student involvement was limited to non-uniform days until my final year at school. When the opportunity suddenly presented itself, I practically bit their arm off. I read the required BBC article on David Cameron’s threat to withdraw aid to Uganda over and over again, and I turned up to my interview with a portfolio of printed photographs (which I still have). I suppose I was hoping to angle my way in as the team journalist. The team was chosen on the night of the interviews and my name was among the four. I still think of it as one of the happiest nights of my life.

The sky began to glow red around 6.40am, and the sun was up moments later. African sunrises really are like the opening to Disney’s The Lion King – that is, visibly quick. Maddie got out for a run in the morning light – we had been on the road for two hours already – before we reached the town of Purongo, a collection of red-walled houses and small businesses on the northern edge of Murchison Falls National Park. This was our Ugandan “welcome wagon”, as it were: a trip to Uganda’s first national park at the end of our first week at the school. Getting in was complicated by the print-date of my US dollars – the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) had taken the decision to refuse any dollars printed before 1981 – but on this occasion they let it slide. We were joined by Robert, one of the park rangers, which brought the total in the car up to seven. I drew the short straw and ended up on the left-side of the middle row, landing a window seat that looked straight into the rising sun.

We learned within the first half-hour of our safari that it was wiser to keep the windows closed: the tsetse flies that share a home with Africa’s megafauna have a taste for human blood, when they can get it. Forget the harmless bluebottles that hurl themselves at your window: tsetse flies are another beast entirely. They’re loud, they have a bite like a needle, and they’re very hard to kill once they get into the car, despite their size, which is considerable. They clung to the glass like remoras for most of the morning, just waiting for somebody to wind down the window for air.

The first of the park’s larger inhabitants came into view just beyond the gates in the form of a herd of Ugandan kob, a stocky antelope that with the crowned crane forms one half of the Ugandan coat of arms. It was a modest start to the safari, and I was a lot more interested in the bizarre-looking hartebeest standing in their midst. With a head that might have given birth to the expression ‘why the long face?’, they look too warped to be real, like a badly stretched photo on a student PowerPoint. It spooked when the car came to a stop and bolted. They seem more skittish than other antelope species: though I saw several of the strange beasts during my time in Uganda, I never did get a good photo of one.

We didn’t have to go much deeper into the park before the park ranger pointed out a giraffe. He needn’t have bothered: at over five metres tall, they aren’t exactly hard to spot. Murchison Falls NP was one of the last holdouts of the giraffe in Uganda, after war and poaching drastically reduced their numbers in the last century. The giraffes that can be seen in Uganda are the nominate species, known as Nubian giraffes, and could once be found as far north as Egypt. Back in 2012, they were still known as Rothschild’s giraffes – they were reclassified in 2016 – so it looks as though they have been “decolonised”, dropping the name of a wealthy British banker and zoologist in favour of a name that conjures up their former homeland. Murchison Falls itself was similarly renamed under the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin Dada, though the fact that he was the brains behind the switch may account for the fact that the park formerly known as Kabalega Falls has since reverted to its old colonial title, for better or for worse.

We reached Paraa around midday, where the Victoria Nile cuts right through the hearts of the national park. We missed the ferry by minutes so we parked up on the riverbank and waited for it to return under a thick cover of cloud. My friends had to stop me from getting too close to the water, as a large pod of hippos were dozing just metres from the bank. Some estimates hold that hippos are responsible for around 500 deaths a year, making them one of the more dangerous creatures on the continent – though not as dangerous as Africa’s snakes, which claim thousands of victims every year. I think I was actually more interested in the gangling jacana that was bobbing around at the water’s edge, but that’s by the by. Just like me to miss the wood for the trees.

From Paraa, it’s a bumpy ride to the falls for which the park is named. I’ve described them in my journal as “royal”. Kabalega – Amin’s preferred name for the falls – comes from Chwa Kabalega II, King of the Bunyoro people who call this corner of Uganda home, so it’s not a poor choice of an adjective. Hailed by the UWA as “the world’s most powerful waterfall”, the Nile is forced through an eight-metre chokepoint, creating a thunderous spectacle as the full force of the world’s longest river is hurled into an abyss known as the Devil’s Cauldron. It really does have to be seen to be believed.

It’s incredible to think that this mighty river winds its way all the way up to the Mediterranean. For centuries, the origins of the Nile were a mystery to the Western World. The Banyoro knew of the great river, of course, but they would have been just as surprised to know that the river that thundered through their kingdom watered the deltas of the pharaohs, some two thousand miles to the north. It might seem strange that the source of such a historically important river remained a mystery well into the nineteenth century, but as the early explorers discovered, the Nile is a treacherous creature that holds onto its secrets with a jealous force almost as strong as its flow: once you reach Sudan, the river becomes heavily overgrown, making navigating by boat near impossible, and stands of reeds and papyrus hug the banks so densely that, in some parts of its course, it obscures the river entirely from view.

The Ancient Romans had a saying, Nili caput quaerere, “to seek the head of the Nile”, which meant to attempt the impossible. It’s possible the saying originated with the Emperor Nero who did just that, tasking a small expeditionary force of his Praetorian Guard to find the legendary source in the first century AD. The historical accounts claim they made it as far as Southern Sudan before finding their passage blocked, but some claim they may have made it as far as the thundering waterfalls of northern Uganda. It’s a strange thought, to picture the Praetorian Guard standing here, staring in awe at the falls in the same spot that shadowed Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart and, much later, myself.

What the photos don’t show is the spectacular double rainbow that forms over the Devil’s Cauldron as the Nile thunders through the gorge. We saw the falls shortly after a brief spell of heavy rain, so the force of the flow was especially ferocious. Two weeks later, when the full force of the wet season came down, it would have been near impossible to get as close to the falls as we got without being blasted with the spray. Apparently, these can sometimes be seen at night, when the moonlight is exceptionally strong: these are called “moonbows”, and have been spotted by birdwatchers who come here looking for the bizarre pennant-winged nightjars that nest in the surrounding forest. We didn’t stay long enough to find out, but I’m sure it must be a beautiful sight to behold.

The first thing I ever saw in Africa was a waterfall. The connecting flight from Heathrow to Addis Ababa rode the clouds for most of the journey, but shortly after waking up on that first morning, the clouds parted for just a moment, revealing a jaw-droppingly beautiful mountainscape, with a silver river launching itself over the edge of a high cliff the colour of bronze. Victoria Falls is the one that comes to mind for most, but for me, it’s a toss-up between Murchison Falls and that nameless cascade that first stopped my heart all those years ago. Maybe I should go in search of more waterfalls!

Honestly, I’m getting the travel bug just writing this. I think it’s time I blew the dust off the travel section in my library and started cooking up a plan. I know I’ve had a grand adventure this year to the States, and I’m grateful, but after a slightly abortive early finish, I feel like I haven’t quite sated the travel bug this time around. Let’s see… if I can pass my driving test, I think I will reward myself with another grand adventure – only next time, I will do it for me. It certainly makes for fun writing! BB x

On the Road Again

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I’ve got my third driving lesson of the summer this afternoon. They’re not going too badly, considering I had a three month hiatus after my last instructor was rushed to hospital, forcing me to cancel just two weeks shy of my test. I wouldn’t say I’m test ready, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s becoming more natural behind the wheel, and I’m hopeful that I will be on the road in wheels of my own before the end of my thirtieth year. That’s the goal, anyway.

Cruising around the unfamiliar roads of Somerset had me thinking about the freedom I will have with a car of my own. It’s the thing people tend to point out time and again when the subject of getting my driver’s licence comes up in conversation, but it’s honestly not something I think about all that often. Which is absurd, because when I do have the chance to get out and explore, I know I’ll be out most weekends if I can, especially in this wild and sometimes desolate corner of the British Isles. With Exmoor, Dartmoor and the Jurassic Coast on my doorstep, I’d be a fool not to.

I’ve been on a number of grand road trips over the course of my travels, and I thought I’d use some old photos as a launch to reminisce about a few of them: snapshots, if you will, of great adventures.

1. The Badia, Jordan. 3rd July 2015: 10:56am

At the end of my first week living in Jordan back in that sweltering summer of 2015, a couple of Dutch students from my language school, Bern and Marco, hired a van and offered to take a group of us out into the Eastern Desert, also known as the Badia, on a Jordanian road trip. It was a bit of a squeeze, fitting ten of us and our supplies into the damned thing, but it allowed us to see more of the country than the public transport system ever could.

Something that strikes you immediately about the Badia is how empty it is. The desert itself is vast, covering more than 72,000km. That’s larger than the Republic of Ireland, and it’s actually only a fraction of the greater Syrian Desert. Highway 40, the road that connects the oasis city of Azraq to the capital Amman, is a largely featureless drive across the edge of the Harrat as-Sham, often translated as the Black Desert. It is no misnomer. Forget your childish images of rolling sand dunes and palm trees. The Black Desert is an immense expanse of flat, black rock, stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions. The silence is almost as oppressive as the heat. One of my American friends, the enigmatic Washingtonian Mackenzie, used to play a game on the road, Camel or Human, every time something larger than a boulder appeared on the horizon. Usually it was a camel, but just every so often we’d pass a wanderer on the road, miles away from everything and everyone. Not exactly a forgiving place to break down.

2. Reinosa, Spain. 21st February 2016: 11.46am

I used a variety of methods to travel around Spain when I lived out there: the carshare app BlaBlaCar, the short-distance Extremadura bus firm LEDA and, latterly, the superb train network RENFE. For the longest journeys I leaned heavily on ALSA, Spain’s answer to National Express. Cheap and efficient, provided you had time to spare, they serve most of Spain’s larger cities and provided a very reliable means of getting around. I took the bus one wintry weekend to see my friend Kate up in Cantabria. It was a ten-hour journey – not for those who get bored or travel-sick – but it does take you through some of Spain’s most breath-taking natural beauty: the wild steppe of Cáceres, the cherry-blossom valleys of Plasencia, the high meseta of Old Castile and the snow-covered mountains of the Cordillera Cantábrica. Driving from south to north across Spain, you really do feel as though you have arrived in a totally different country when you step out of the car at the end of the day.

I hitched a ride south to get home with a friendly student who was heading back to Algeciras after visiting family in Santander. At over 1,000km, it’s probably one of the longest drives you can do in the country. Luckily for me, Villafranca de los Barros was on his way home. In a year where I hardly saw any snow – and where Durham got some of its best in a decade – it was spellbinding to see the northern reaches of Castile covered in a heavy blanket of snow and ice. I’ll have to come back and explore someday.

3. Piste 1507, Morocco. 20th March 2015. 11.45am

Another marathon road trip, and one of the most bizarre. My friend Archie and I hailed a grand taxi in Oulad Berhil for Ouarzazate, a desert town famous for being the location of choice for a number of movie studios who require a desert theme in a relatively safe location (including blockbusters like The Mummy and Gladitator). Our taxi driver, Ibrahim – whose name I only discerned from the badge on his windshield – was quite possibly the grouchiest, least sociable character I have ever encountered on my travels. Over the course of a three-and-a-half-hour drive across the rugged mountain valleys of Drâa-Tafilalet, he never said a word, despite our intermittent attempts to engage him in conversation. Perhaps he found us tiresome, or perhaps he was cooking up the plan he would later carry out to quintuple the price we had agreed back in Oulad Berhil, safe in the knowledge that Archie’s rucksack (and passport) was locked up in the boot of his car. I’ll never know. Archie fell asleep for much of the trek, but I spent the greater part of it with my eyes glued to the window, watching the world beyond sail past. I love road trips for that. I don’t think I could ever get tired of seeing the world.

4. Interstate 65, Alabama, 3rd July 2024. 7.40pm

It’s one number shy of Route 66, but it was a phenomenal introduction to the American road trip. The highway in question travels north from Mobile on the south coast of Alabama all the way up to the shores of Lake Michigan in Gary, Indiana. I was only on the road for a fraction of it, from Birmingham up to Huntsville, but it was enough to make my eyes pop. Squashed armadillos, discarded tyre tracks and billboards were features I had anticipated to some degree, but the forests… I don’t think I was aware at all of just how forested North America truly was. The history books and the movies give the impression that most of the great tracts of forest were cut down, but in the American South – especially in the foothills of Appalachians – they go on for mile after mile, stretching across the land like an immense green carpet. The highways just cut right through them, dynamiting their way through hill and mountain as though they were merely molehills.

If I’d known how painful the destination would prove, would I have still made that journey?

Absolutely. Without a second’s hesitation. Some things are worth burning for. Some things are worth traveling all around the world to see, even if only for a moment in your life.

5. Boroboro, Uganda, 11th October 2012. 5.06pm

I thought I’d end this post with what is probably the best photo I’ve ever taken, and one that has a real story behind it.

One month into my first teaching post in northern Uganda, I was invited to visit the former headmaster, Mr Ojungu Hudson Luke, on his farm on the banks of the White Nile. It was an incredible experience, herding Uganda’s famous longhorn cattle through the forests and the driving rain, with one of the world’s greatest rivers thundering away in the background, and perhaps I’ll tell you that story and more as the summer draws to a close. On the way home, after three days without access to electricity, my camera was out of charge, bringing my frenetic documentary spree to a standstill. Uganda’s roads can be treacherous and breakdowns are common, and when they do happen, they can be final: I will always remember the graveyard of trucks and lorries between Boroboro and Lira, rotting at the side of the road where they collapsed. Luckily, we made it back to Lira with little trouble, just in time to meet a tropical storm riding in on dark clouds.

The lighting was spectacular: brilliant evening sunshine, heavy, dark clouds, vivid colours all around. Red African soil and a thousand shades of green. Not for the first time in my life, I gave the finger to the sunburn on my skin and rode the last hour of the journey in the back of the truck so that I could see the world with my own eyes. Determined to capture the moment, I took the battery out of my camera and tried to breathe new life into it by rubbing it between my hands and – well – breathing on it. The first roll of thunder came rumbling down just as I pushed the battery back in and bought myself a couple of seconds. With Luke Ojungu still hurtling up the road at quite a pace, I grabbed two shots of the passing countryside from the back of the truck before the camera died.

We were a hundred metres or so from home when a lightning bolt struck a tree just ahead of us, bringing half the trunk down across the telegraph wires, which exploded in a shower of brilliant sparks. We were lucky to avoid any harm, but we soon found out we would be without power for the best part of a week until the electricians came around to fix the problem. It was only after that, with power restored, that I was able to charge my camera and see what I had managed to capture: a beautifully evocative shot of the countryside around Boroboro, lined up almost as though on command. I have it framed in my living room beneath a matching frame of Kanyonyi, the silverback of the mountain gorilla troupe we tracked on that same expedition.

Do stay tuned – I think it might be fun to relive my Ugandan adventures with you, since they predated the blog by some three years! BB x

Article Ten

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

This morning I found myself in Taunton’s market square, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a branch of the Stand Up To Racism movement, some of whom had come from as far afield as Bristol to head off the rumoured far-right protest that had been brewing here.

It was morbid curiosity that drew me into town, I suppose. My driving instructor inadvertently tipped me off about the planned protest, and the journalist in me wanted to see events unfold for myself rather than trust in the news, which is so very hard to do these days. I had no idea that the rally I would find would be the counter-protest, nor had I planned to join in, but curiosity turned into a burning sense that the right thing to do, the right place to be, was there with the peace rally.

My great-grandparents, Mateo and Mercedes, had little love for the fascist regime under Franco. My bisabuela went to the grave convinced that the state had murdered her husband on the operating table, as his Marxist beliefs were well-known. So in a way, it felt like carrying on their work, standing up to fascism, even in a small way, some seventy years after Mateo’s demise.

Trade unionists. Socialists. Artists. Refugees. Doctors, policewomen, teachers. English, German, Indian, Cameroonian, Brazilian. Shouts of Whose streets? Our streets! Representatives from other movements jumped aboard: Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine joined the fray. Some of the speakers pulled the rally in different directions: frustration against the super-rich coorporations, against Sunak, Patel and Braverman, against the police (who, credit where credit is due, had sent a small detachment to protect the rally today, so that last speaker’s targeting was poorly judged). I couldn’t help but be reminded of Orwell’s experience in Catalunya during the Civil War, however, with so many factions within the Republican camp and our own. If the opposition did come to meet us in force, theirs would be a militia to our band of mercenaries.

The minutes turned to hours, and the opposing force that were supposed to be marching on Market Square failed to materialise. A police officer let us know that the mustering point in Hamilton Park was still empty at one o’clock, when they were supposed to have gathered in force, and a cheer went up from the crowd. An elderly Indian man embraced everyone around him, gleefully repeating “We did it! We scared them off!”.

Scared is probably the wrong word. You can’t quell that kind of resentment that easily. They also weren’t entirely invisible this morning: an armoured car sporting four Union Jacks and a large gun mounted on the roof did make three threatening laps of the square towards the start of the rally, its driver staring at us with hostile, wordless eyes, before the police chased him off. I should be grateful that’s the closest we got to any kind of danger.

I confess I don’t exercise my civil right to protest nearly as much as I should. Going to a protest in London always felt dangerous, and just getting there and back was easier said than done, what with Thameslink and Southern Rail experiencing eternal delays. So it’s nice to be able to do my part here in Taunton, while I still have time and energy to spare.

It’s now after 4pm. The Avon and Somerset police issued a statement half an hour ago that the planned protest never did take place. They also counted us – at its peak, there were sixty of us in the square, beating back the prejudice and the hate with words alone. It’s a small victory, but if such a thing can be repeated nationwide, we will have made these islands a friendlier place for those who come here to seek their destiny.

To paraphrase one of the speakers today, immigrants are the backbone of our NHS, but they prop up the country in so many other ways. They give us new perspectives, open up our small worlds to larger spheres. If we can open our hearts and our minds, we can learn so much from them. The United Kingdom is not just a name, it’s an ideal: a kingdom of people from all walks of life, working together. We are so much the richer for it.

Life doesn’t always take us in the direction we want, but it does have a very good habit of setting us back on the right path in the end. Or, in another writer’s words:

The infinite will of God is always mysterious, mercifully granting us what we need more often than what we want.

Thomas Hoover, Moghul

See you around, folks. BB x

Saudade

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

SAUDADE – (n.) a deep nostalgic longing for someone or something absent, infused with a melancholic awareness that it may never return.

I looked up last night and saw a plane coming in to land at Heathrow. One of the big ones that comes in from across the Atlantic, like the one I flew home on nearly five weeks ago. It made me think of that Monday morning, seeing the sunrise over London, knowing in my head – even if I didn’t want to admit it in my heart – that I had come to the end of a cheery chapter in my life.

A plane like that one brought her here to this cloud-covered island many months ago. I wonder what my summer would have looked like if it hadn’t?

The Portuguese have this wonderful untranslatable expression called ‘saudade’. It’s often taken to mean the feeling of missing someone or somewhere, or more precisely a sense of longing for that thing, but many Portuguese and Brazilians will tell you that it’s a lot more subtle than that. There’s a sense of finality to it, also: an understanding that what you once had may never come back at all, an acceptance of that, but a wistful longing for it all the same. Not the raw kind that breaks you in the days and weeks that follow, but a tempered and reflective sense of nostalgia for what once was and what could have been.

It’s not unique to the Portuguese, but it is especially common in their culture – and perhaps even more so among the Brazilians. It is said that the expression may have evolved during the Age of Discoveries, when the wives of the great explorers of the day bade farewell to their husbands and lovers as they set out for the Americas (how ironic) knowing full well that they may never see them again, and that if they did, they would return as changed men.

Among the Brazilians, it has taken on the sense of a nostalgia for a lost future: a golden country that never was. The American dream isn’t just limited to the States – a shard of it can be found embedded like a splinter in the subconscious of all the descendants of the colonists, I believe. Why else should they have made such a journey if not in hope of a better tomorrow?

I feel that way about Spain, sometimes. Perhaps that’s the generational shockwave of my grandfather’s death in his mid-twenties, rippling across the years to the present, an echo of a lost world that could have been. Spain calls to us. It has been calling for sixty years. Come back. Come home. Sometimes you spend hours, days and even weeks waiting for somebody to reply (looking at you, folks on Hinge) without realising that something greater has been waiting for you all the time, if only you knew how to answer.

I have been the architect of my own saudade by choosing to devote my life to gazing upon that dream from afar: teaching Spanish to the English, sharing my love for a country I can only touch a few times a year. It is a test of endurance, to look upon a thing of beauty and not to touch. Spain has always been that thing. It fills me with awe, excitement, a deep-seated admiration and an infectious appreciation for life itself, but a sense of longing all the same, knowing that it is in my heart, but beyond my reach. Like there’s something blocking the way that I can’t see. Perhaps it’s akin to sleeping beside a former lover, after the love has gone.

I wandered through the woods as the sun came down. I think the nightjars have already gone back to Africa – there must be plenty of them around for a local bar to bear the name The Nightjar – but I was followed across the heath by a pair of stonechats. In that year I spent growing up in the Andalusian sierras, that was a sound that accompanied me every weekend on my forays down to the abandoned railway at the foot of the mountain where we lived: a whistle followed by a song like the clash of two small stones.

Further in, I found a couple of kite feathers. There are so many in these woods. When I was a child, you would have been lucky to see a buzzard – poison and poor public perception very nearly wiped them out – but now they’re everywhere once again. The red kites that once quartered the streets of London before their extirpation in the 19th century have also come back with a bang, and their feathers turn up in the forest quite regularly. I left some in a small tree for another person to find – some bright-eyed kid like me, perhaps, who might take them home as a treasure. Something they can look back on in years to come, and remember the day, remember the smell of the forest, remember the one who took them there by the hand – the feel of their hand, the sunlight in their laugh. I’d like to think that. BB x

Before the Storm

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Three weeks of the summer holidays remain, which I must now try to fill somehow. Yesterday I went up to Bristol – for better shopping, primarily, but also because I’d never been, and there’s at least a couple of things in this city that I wanted to achieve: a new suit for work, and a close encounter with arguably one of the most famous statues in the country.

Bristol was not as busy as I expected, but then, with all this talk of protest in the air, perhaps that’s not surprising. Despite the official line from the police to the contrary, at least two shopkeepers warned me to get out of town before 6pm. They said that a mob was being gathered online to march on an immigration legal aid firm in the Old Market district, not more than five minutes or so from Bristol Temple Meads Station. I passed several shops with signs in the windows indicating an early closure, and I saw at least one being boarded up, just in case things got out of hand.

Part of me considered sticking around to see what went down, but for once, the rational part of my brain (which usually plays second-fiddle to the romantic up there) took charge and sent me home. Still, it was quite something to see a city preparing for potentially violent civil unrest, like a quiet siege. It was rather eerie. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

As it happens, there was a protest march that evening – but not the one that was expected. Nearly two thousand anti-racists staged a peaceful counter-protest in Bristol’s Old Market, where the anti-immigration rally was due to take place. My faith in this country has been restored, even if only by a little.

I visited the M Shed Museum in the Bristol dockyards, where the statue of Edward Colston can now be seen after it was recovered from the bottom of the harbour. Social media played a decisive role in mobilising the mob back then, too, albeit under very different circumstances.

Colston rests in a glass sarcophagus surrounded by a collection of placards borne by those who tore him from his plinth back in 2020. It looks almost like one of the stone effigies you might find in a cathedral, with homemade banners replacing the coats of arms.

Colston used much of the wealth that he accrued from his involvement with the Atlantic slave trade to philanthropic ends in Bristol and beyond, establishing almshouses and sponsoring schools. For more than two hundred years, he was even something of a local hero. But times have changed since the events of 2020, and a much-needed revision of the history books has shed a new darkness on men like Colston who, for all their good deeds, were active participants in a system which brought unimaginable misery, pain and slaughter to millions. Colston had many hats, but “slave trader” is usually the first title next to his name in most accounts.

I wonder if history will see modern “heroes” like Steve Jobs in the same light someday for their involvement in the rape of the Congo and its people for the coltan that powers our phones. We may be reliant on the damned things for just about everything these days, but that’s a poor excuse, when you think about it. After all, we used a similar excuse to justify the entire slave trade once upon a time.

I did a little window-shopping before popping into a second-hand vinyl store in search of a couple of albums for my wall. I’m in the process of making my house a really happy space, and I figured I’d take a leaf out of the book of my old bandleader (and great inspiration), Mr D, and frame a few LP sleeves. I was tempted by a couple of colourful Fela Kuti numbers, but in the end I came away with just the one LP: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, one of “the Big Three” albums that changed my life, alongside MJ’s Thriller and The Corrs’ Forgiven Not Forgotten. I’ll hunt the other two down on eBay.

Until the next time! BB x

Upping Sticks

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

2nd August, 6:53am, Lincoln Train Station

Today is the first day of a new life. I’m moving to Somerset to take up a new job, a place where I’ve never lived before and where the only folks I know are my godparents who live in one of the neighbouring villages. I’ve done this kind of thing before several times now – Durham, Villafranca, Tetouan – but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. I’ve got AC/DC’s Thunderstruck on repeat in my earphones to keep me looking up. It’s been my go-to pick-me-up of the summer.

Something always gets left behind on days like today – this time it was a carrier bag containing my laptop, my Switch and – really frustratingly – my satchel, which contains my journal. There’s nothing in there that I’m going to need per se over the next few days, but that journal travels with me everywhere. It feels strange not to have it on me on such an important day.

2nd August, 9.25am, London Paddington Station

The queue for Platform 9¾ was already four rows wide when my train pulled into London King’s Cross. It’s absolutely blown up in popularity in the last ten years or so, which may be proof that, though J.K. Rowling’s fanbase may be divided about the author, the mania for her wizarding world is very much alive.

The moving team have arrived at my old house and have started what must be the Herculean task of loading all of my things into a Luton van. Meanwhile, I’m racing across country on the train ahead of them to sort things out at my end. Moving is always complicated, but moving between boarding schools adds another layer. I’ll be relieved when today is over – but it’s not all hard labour. A busy mind is a happy mind.

I heard singing on the underground and removed my headphones to see what was going on. A little gypsy lady in a face mask was shuffling down the train, singing with an alto voice so full of pain and passion that I was surprised nobody else was tuning in. Everywhere, up and down the train, AirPods were buried deep, eyes glued to screens, avoiding her eye. I caught snatches of familiar words that might have been Portuguese, or it might have been Romanian, or even Caló. She carried a small black plastic cup. There were no coins in it.

I got off the train and gave her a note. It was all I could find in my wallet that wasn’t euros or quarters. The Spanish have a saying:

Quién canta, sus males espanta.

It means something along the lines of “singing drives your pain away”. Gypsy music isn’t very good at that, since a lot of it deals with the overwhelming suffering and exclusion of the Rom, but it is powerful stuff, and it shook me from my reverie. That deserves a reward in itself.

2nd August, 3.12pm, Taunton

I’m here in my new flat in Taunton! It feels hollow without my things here, but the removal firm can only be half an hour away at this point, so I won’t be hearing my voice echoing about the place for too long. Because of that, I’m confined to barracks for the time being, so no exploring the town just yet. That, for the present, must wait, at least until I’ve put my bed together and the removal men are on their way home.

It turns out my Nintendo was flattened beneath my mum’s car as we left this morning – I must have left the carrier bag on the drive in a moment of fatigue. I should be more cut up: it’s been a trusty distraction over the last week (and the last four years come to think of it) but perhaps that’s a sign from up there that it’s time to put that world behind me. By some miracle, my laptop – in the same bag – survived unscathed, cushioned by the books I’d crammed in with it on either side. They, of course, aren’t damaged at all. Which just goes to show the superiority of books, right?

4th August, 2.11pm, Taunton

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve moved in, and I’m working on moving on. It isn’t easy, but I feel like I’m starting to get there. Perhaps you know the feeling: when you wake up one morning and they’re still on your mind, but the thought doesn’t hurt like it did the night before. It just… is. A kind of acceptance sets in. That’s healthy. What we had was beautiful, but it’s in the past now, and ahead lies only the future. I can face that now.

Luckily, I have enough books about me now to keep me occupied for months, or even years. The last month has been crazy, and after a month of living out of a rucksack I have a place to call home again. It’s strange, starting up in a new place where you don’t know anybody, and we’re a long way from the bright lights of yuppie London, but I’m hoping I can find some people on my level here in Somerset.

I was doing some reflective writing the other day and I realised I’ve had eighteen homes over the course of my life (that is, I have lived in eighteen different places for a period of more than two months). After a very stable childhood, I started moving around as a teenager and haven’t really stopped since, living in various places around the UK to far-off destinations like Spain, Jordan, Morocco and Uganda. Eighteen. That’s only twelve homes few than my age. No wonder I have a hard time finding a place to call home.

First driving lesson in several months tomorrow. Lord, if you’d be so kind, give me the strength to see this hurdle through. It would be jolly nice to be able to drive at last. Walking everywhere is fun and all, if only for the additional height it puts on people’s eyebrows when I tell them, but the joke is wearing thinner every year. BB x