One day, with members of the Montserrat Walking Club, we walked up to the fumarole and stood staring into its stinky aorta. At the time it meant little to me, this fistula in the chest of Ceres, but now I wonder if Uncle Bob’s longevity — he died this year aged eighty-six — owed something to his sojourn on Montserrat? He ended his days in North Carolina, but perhaps his regular rendezvous with the volcano in the 1970s and ’80s allowed him to draw on its immense reserves of hot temper and so keep himself both alive and kicking.
Fujian Mind Warp
The nineteen Chinese who died cockling in Morecambe Bay this February must have been hideously disorientated. The mile-wide sands, crossed by the channels of two rivers and networked with rivulets, are notoriously confusing; the tide also behaves here with fatal capriciousness, ebbing and flowing in patterns which can only be apprehended by those who’ve had years of experience. I was up on the fringes of the bay in January and even a brief walk along the sands, leaning at a forty-five-degree angle into the spume-laden gale, was enough to convince me that this was no place for anyone not powerfully motivated — desperate, even. As I plodded towards them flocks of oystercatchers lifted off into the vortical wind, where they were spun about like myriad items of tiny black and white laundry. Strange sand carts pulled by kites whipped about me, while on shore the windows of a giant old people’s home were whited out by filmy cataracts of net curtain.
But what must it have been like for the Chinese? On the far side of the world from their natal homes in Fujian province, spending short nights crammed like sardines in vans parked in the dunes, before being turfed out, in darkness, to sieve the damp sand for a mollusc they’d never heard of before. There was no justification for this, no cultural swell of atavistic jellied memory to send them in pursuit of Cockles (and Mussels) Alive, Alive O. Then they found themselves caught between advancing walls of water with no way back to dry land, and so died, choking on their own disorientation.
Rather than engage with the existential horror of their demise, the British media preferred to treat of the Chinese’s tragedy in purely economic terms. Whether classed as illegal immigrants or asylum seekers, their penury was the ostensible reason for their death, not the fact that they didn’t know where they were. So disgustingly orientated were the news agencies that they were able to despatch reporters to Fujian within hours of the tragedy, so that they could present to us highly accurate images of the forsaken place.
Those Chinese drowned in Morecambe Bay; the other Chinese suffocated in the lorry parked at the Dover ferry port; the Africans who plummet from the undercarriages of intercontinental jets as they make their approach to the developing world — am I alone in seeing all of these people as victims of extreme disorientation? Can we not go further and see that the attitudes of all Little Englander NIMBYists are merely a function of their privileged orientation? Knowing their place makes them determined to preserve it against all-comers. Or so they think, because in truth there are many among them who haven’t got a clue where they truly are. Chop down the hedge, grub out the rhododendrons, warp the way markers and steal the route map from the glove compartment of their car, then they’d be floundering as forlornly as any cockle coolie.
Frankly, I think David Blunkett1 should impose an orienteering test along with his citizenship exam; moreover, I think this should be retroactive, so that even those of us who’ve lived here all our lives should be obliged to pass, or else face expulsion. I propose this in the full knowledge that I myself might well be in severe difficulty. As I sit here, looking out over the rooftops of south London towards the giant glass Gherkin which now constitutes my most obvious point of orientation, I think I’m facing east. But I’m not 100 per cent certain of this, any more than I’m convinced of where I’m headed as I turn left out of my own front door. For most of us our social, political and economic orientation completely obscures where we are geographically. We live out our lives in cities that blot out natural features, while we resort to mechanical transport to annihilate distances and gradients. Disorientation is a luxury that only we in the affluent West can truly afford.
A fellow psychogeographer of mine — let’s call him X — has been driving his wife slowly insane for years now with a creepy mind warp. Every time he drives her to the supermarket, in order to torment her with the fact of her disorientation he takes a slightly longer route. The journey can now take anything up to an hour (it should be no more than twenty minutes), and if she has the temerity to complain he merely informs her that it’s a new shortcut. I point out to X in no uncertain terms, that, while his wife may have lost her sense of direction, he’s abandoned any sense of proportion. Both of them are now floundering in the quicksand of a failed marriage, while the treacherous tide of mortality races inexorably towards them.
Côte of Desire
The Côte d’Azur isn’t really a place at all — more a state of mind stretched out over hundreds of kilometres of beaches, headlands, outcrops, fish restaurants, walled villas and foul-tempered chiens. This sun-soaked coastline is like the strap of a bikini, suntan-oiled then teased by the imagination. My parents borrowed a house one winter at Cap d’Antibes. I was two years old and a precocious enough consumer to complain vociferously at receiving only a red plastic train for Christmas. I remember eating oysters; a palm tree growing in a courtyard; my mother collecting sea-smoothed chunks of coloured glass on the beach. She put her bounty in jars filled with water which she placed on the windowsills of the villa; the wintery sun shone through these stained-glass canisters.
Like all exotica experienced in earliest childhood, the South of France became entangled in my mind with its representations. Was it Willie Maugham who entertained at Cap Ferrat — or me? Was it Scott and Zelda who wheeled their Bugatti along the Corniche — or me? The swaddled figure scratching away in his notebook on the beach at Bandol, was it Thomas Mann, or, yet again, me? Hemingway and Picasso fighting on a canvas ring in the market square of Juan-les-Pins (where my lovely goes to, tra-la-la-la-la-la-la!); Truffaut and Bardot sunning themselves on Ari’s yacht; Cézanne reducing the rocks to savage geometric configurations; Maigret nosing about Porquerolles savagely puffing on his pipe. Me, me, me, me-me-me!
So when I actually got to go there in early adulthood the experience remained curiously unreal, not least because I was under the auspices of louche Anglo-French aristos. We ate long lunches at restaurants in perfectly conical medieval hilltop villages, then drove to Les Calanques and dove off the white stone ledges into the inky Mediterranean. Or else we fetched up in Cassis, and after downing the requisite langouste quadrille, took the bizarre little mock submarine, which, semi-submersed, pedaloed across the harbour, affording us obscure views of the reefs of old Evian bottles on the seabed.
Bouillabaisse royaume was eaten at Le Brusc, in a giant glassed-in restaurant, itself not unlike a fish tank; and frankly the French bourgeoisie stuffing their faces were quite as ugly as the fish in the stew. There were promenades along the beachfront at Bandol, and on one memorable occasion we dropped acid and crossed over to the queer little island of Bendor. This blob of land was owned by a pastis millionaire and had been tricked out as a concrete Moorish fantasia, all crenellated courtyards and wonky minarets. In truth, Bendor was so bizarre that it quite neutralised the effect of the LSD; and it wasn’t until we were back in Bandol, at one of those café-bars that charges forty quid for a vitelline-hued cocktail in a glass the size of a vitrine, that I remembered I was hallucinating.