LDN to BUDAPEST to BUCHAREST to SOFIA to THESSALONIKA to KAVALA to THASSOS N BACK – travel writing

I half beer
I champage
I palinka
I red
I palinka

And then she stopped counting

Chainsaw
Holy soup
Holy goulash

A spunk-strewn British flag lies over a black, metal trunk in the alcove of the gay bar on Prague’s outskirts. It is daytime, late December 1992. The action has left the building, leaving a smell of beer, good-times and a plastic policeman’s hat, which is scraped up from the floor by an English-speaking manager who took pity on the three of us – female students, who somehow found ourselves without somewhere to stay after a two day bus ride from London. Directing us to a grand flat, dripping with gold and literature up near the famous clock tower. We’d made it.

I’d been to Prague before. In 1990 I’d carried memorabilia from Amsterdam to Charles Bridge where me and a Dutch-Indonesian guy whom I became biro pals with (who later had plays on Dutch radio which were banned, I never asked why) worshipped at the Lennon Wall – my fave monument in the world ever, which on that first visit was just a candle, burning for world peace and love, with a photo of the dead Beatle. Flowers hung around it like a Hindi temple and a few of us left messages, in biros on the walls. (I was travelling with my parents, from Amsterdam, with my own tent, them giving me freedom to explore. It was a pretty cool trip.) By this return in 1992, the sacred shrine of Lennon’s Wall (who I often spelt like Lenin) prayed on anything alternative: The Doors, The Velvet Underground, but “I heart Guns n Roses” in massive graffiti writing – that didn’t make sense. To me, at that time, Guns n Roses stood for nothing – the west was impacting.

By 1997, of course my appreciation of songs such as Mr Brownstone grew. And it was around then, reporting for Scene with the British shock artists, that I checked in on my rock n roll mecca once more. The acid-house generation were still in naive belief that Blair would never go to war and unity would guide us into the next millennium. The popular belief he manifested (until he lost us) by getting Oasis over to Number 10 for all that champagne supernova malarky. Yet we were desperate for a government to believe in after Thatcher’s rave dissolution, taking our parties into superclubs she could tax, and monitor. In came artists we could believe in: their values of privileged liberty were explored in video, installation and on walls: porn, freedom to fuck, vegetarianism etc, and after a rather loud night on the absinth, fellow hotel residents pushed a note beneath Tracey Emin’s door saying they were “ashamed to be British”, (the note Mat Collishaw made into a T-shirt). It was punk and Cool Brittannia. Although, I found more light at the Lennon Wall, standing as a glocal foreshadow of mobile phones bringing everything closer, the iron curtain peeled back bad hip-hop graffiti, stretching far along the river. The west wanted more west, as my friends had wanted more city, back in the New Year of ’93. Taking an overnight sleeper to Keleti, Budapest’s main station. For £20. It was serious adventure. Communism fell in ’89, as it had in Czechoslovakia, but unlike Prague, we were the only tourists in Hungary. Or maybe there were a few other bravehearts, but they’ve vanished from my memory in these blurs of youth. A woman pounced us as we arrived, offering us a place to stay. Trustingly, we travelled an hour out of Budapest (!) to a pine forest village covered in snow. We fed village dogs our old salami, only to have village children pull it from the dogs’ mouths. The alpine houses were all made with local wood. It was modern and excellent for young explorers. Every little shop in the village (of which there were two, basically sheds with no signs, built onto living rooms) offered us vodka shots as soon as we were through the door. That’s the kinda behaviour that can make a girl fall in love.

Budapest was a train ride away, and I remember it being very dark at all times. No shops with illuminated anything – no flash windows, just huge black cement buildings, Tudor-esque hills of medieval voids, wide-roads rambling ordered forever, entrancing squares of balconied houses that stood off main streets – looking down as if the centre was a theatre. If you wanted to buy something it was held in a glass-enclosed unit behind a big Hungarian behind a counter. My pride purchase was a patchwork sheepskin waistcoat “It’s for a child!” laughed the woman with big arms.

At a Turkish bath, massages were done with soap bars and buckets of water. My pal Juliette, who’d been brought up Catholic, screamed in hysterics at the proposition of walking around naked in public with a towel the size of a flannel.

Now, in 2014, the baths have signs in English and there are massages available in oils and chocolate and all sorts. I’m sure Grindr and Tinder and Sugardaters work as well as they do in any other western city. For now there are tourists everywhere. You can buy everything from Zara to Louis Vuitton. Budapest has become City Break Central, and with Alex, my husband, we visited Kiraly and Gellert baths. Kiraly is beautiful, more authentic than Gellert, with the obligatory holes in a domed roof, plunge pools where Alex was warned of their shrinking powers, there’s an outside tub, in a square in the gardens. It’s a right hang-out. Gellert, by comparison, is ginormous – they make women wear swimming hats to swim in the pool – men don’t. And in both, everyone wears swimming costumes. The first time I went, with the girls, it was naked and same sex. Annoyingly, if you want to swim and haven’t been before, hats are available to purchase once you’ve locked all your goods away in a locker. But there are bars, for lunch, it’s the kind of place you can stay all day, but of course we didn’t arrive until the sun had nearly set…There are outdoor pools, sun loungers, and yes, Wes Anderson has defo visited. Shame to share the water. Which I made the mistake of perhaps drinking a little too much of, having read of Agua Juventus – offering eternal youth – Bottle That Shit and Sell It To ME, I thought, drinking as greedily as I felt looking at the cream cakes at the Centrál Café (I’m lactose intolerant).

We were in Hungary for the wedding of artist, Marta Rocamora and composer, Gregor Konready’s wedding. This Catalan / Hungarian couple met working at the Red Gallery and they helped enormously at our wedding, so it seemed a good circle to celebrate their love.
We thought we’d go five star for 4 nights, booking the Buddha Hotel – (and should have stayed at the Boscolo) – Buddha is all red and black, nailed over the top of nouveau – a nightclub-style place full of waiters laughing at the chaos of breakfast and storming into our room for a party at weird times of the night.

Ernesto Leal, who founded Red Gallery, arrived with the co-founder, Yarda Krampol and Red director, Giuseppe Percuoco. We goulashed it up for a night before leaving town to a place where the Hungarian princes took their crowns – Szekesfehervar, or as Ernesto called it: Che Guevara. I was calling it Shake it Baby. Met by the groom’s brother, we went onto Tac, now 70k from Budapest, where we were all staying, where the reception would be…
Alex and I had a quick look around the village, he thought I was joking when I told him I was going into a shop – it was one of those sheds I’d been to twenty years ago. We returned to our room, changing into appropriate garb and the Spanish mother ceremoniously separated herself from her bridal daughter.

A big master of marital proceedings with a huge felt cape in cream and red, fairytale leather boots and an accordion was our guide – joining us on the solidarity bus back to Che Guevara Shake It Baby, where the exchanging of rings would occur. With a soundtrack including The Bangles’ Eternal Flame, there was rice throwing, photos, and the Red contingent escaped, now with several more of us, planning to re-group in half an hour. Of course, after taking a beer, and an ice cream and photos, we missed the bus back to the reception. Cabbed it back. We were lucky enough to witness such traditions as the holy cutting of the log – where man and wife each hold an end of a saw before the chainsaw is passed to the wife, with champagne toasts and the first palinka (the stuff they’d called vodka back in the sheds)…

Uncle Andres and his revolutionist’s moustache

There was so much palinka. And pastries. I did a full palinka detox – sitting with catalans, all excited for the forthcoming Scottish election. Singing Kalinka Kalinka with Palinka Palinka. After a few hours, chicken was dropped on the table – we ripped it from the bones before broth followed with aldente gnocci pasta and pimento on the side – amazing food – then holy stew and potatoes – all hail a decent goulash, and sauercraut and gherkins – and once one’s appetite had been met – fried cheese and fried hash brown and fried rolled up ham and we danced all night, found a secret bar with a huge lizard dragon in it. And more alcohol and holy goulash and holy stew. Marta began wearing her belt around her head, all hippy child, before dosie-dohing around and coming back down for dessert dressed as a Hungarian Disney Princess. Greg was all top hat and tales, looked like he was from a century ago – which is quite a weird thing for an electronic music producer…all friends forever – the dawn rose, and the tour with Red Gallery ended at 5am, when Alex and I took a cab to the station to get our train to Bucharest…

City pipes up like rattlesnakes
Ecstasy sunrise
Crowns in the road
Capital comes
And crashes
Full metal church

Woemania.

Men with double earrings
Gypsy with wooden stick
Men with big moustaches
Helmet hat bellend rooftops
Big cereal fields
Meeting puppies on platform
Gypsy no eyes – prison tattoo number, steal a child, beg. Gypsy curse.
One way.
Pear dumpling haystacks.

There is a bored girl called Amelia going to Bucharesti – I give her Polish fudge, the same type my old Polish neighbours used to give me. The Danube is wide as a lake and really is blue. It’s stunning, wild, green hills forever. Takes 15 hours from 7 this morn to 11 tonight to reach:

BUCHAREST

I leave half a bottle of wine from the wedding with a guy walking with a shepherd’s stick, defo part of the 3% of Romanians who are of Romany stock. (Blame British media for my surprise at this statistic.) 3% battered, tattooed, outcaste. It’s wild here. Loads of men drinking beer around barrel tables at a little nightshop shack at the back in the station, where hard-as-iron women serve. It seems the educational standards aren’t very EU – there’s very little English and there’s the same stupid factor you find in any central city station with boozy guys stepping over luggage rather than waiting for it to be moved. It is midnight…and cities congregations are often stupid.

Having eaten peanuts and crisps since the wedding, we relish a half grilled chicken and a spicy merguez-esque sausage, violent red, with big cut chips. Everyone else eats beer. We could have had about 4 Happy Meals from the undercutting new MacDonald’s for the same price.

We roll our luggage around the outside perimeter – got an hour before the connection to Sofia. The streets are wide and glitz-free. There a couple of uber-lights – from a Subway and the obligatory supermarket-near-the-station which makes most of its cash from meths-esque products. It’s dark here, huge communist buildings reach into the sky, without the glow of cities such as London. Black as the sea we shaln’t see the Danube wash into.

TOWARDS SOFIA

When a weird Soviet guy starts taking your train ticket from you in the middle of the night, it doesn’t matter if he’s dressed as a night guard in the sleeper train you’re boarding to Sofia. What happens if he just takes the tickets, flogs them on, and tries to kick us off the train? All aboard for pure costume drama. We’ve stepped past an ancient tea toiler boiler, and Hey Jude sings from a ginourous comms device of the same era as the song, all inside a worker’s cabin. There’s a woman in there, bored, getting dressed or undressed. Dark wood everywhere. Red claret carpets and velvet bunks. The weird Soviet guy wants to exchange our tickets for sheets. But he can’t tell us that. Speaks no English, I have no Hungarian or Bulgarian – although later pick up a couple of words – in Greece. A fight nearly broke out as he drunkenly staggered over Alex’s shoe – he seemed to be complaining about the difference in the quality of their footwear before passing over the sheets, as we bid adieu to our evidence of purchase. I’ve always said the problem with communism is shit shoes.
Yet we wake with no problems, Soviet guy is smiling, the morning light shows Bulgaria to be far craggier than Romania, which was soft and undulating.
Raw nature. Verdant – never trodden by human foot, in any kind of shoes, there’s loads of it – on and on. Everything is written in Soviet script/cyrillic.

SOFIA

Che Guevara awaits in shops at the commie station. There are pictures of various revolutionaries, above glistening pastries. No cashpoint. A McD’s in a tent. Left luggage womanned by a little lady. Everything looks like you’re wearing glasses with a nicotine sheen. Part of Europe since 2007 but uses Lei as the currency. A few alco-groupies await tourists at Sofia station – people trying to help for 1 Lei…about the cost of the biggest bottles of beer ever – like maxi-bottles of Coca Cola. We get a train to Centrum. Metro. New. Two stops.

Homemade orangeade with mint for me and big ice cream coffee for Alex. The esplanade is wide, with cafes all along the centre of the main shopping streets. It’s mellow and cosmo with mountains at the ends of the roads. Lunch in a cafe playing house music. Every cafe played house music. Big Byzantine church – gold gold gold domes, amazing mosaics, blues. Beautiful. Walk around town for the afternoon.

Steaming through country now. Back on another train. This time to Thessaloniki. It’s a long way. Agrarian climbs down from the mountains. Rivers, roads. Slow life in the south looks richer than the dying communist bloks nearer the city.

Hark, wheels stopping. That was us and the German interrailers freeeeeaking out. Train has been going in the wrong direction for 30 minutes. It’s picked up some random carriages – we’d just got into Greece, after a 38 hour journey, we don’t really want an extra couple of hours on a train.
Yet we arrive in Thessaloniki 10 minutes early.

WHY DID WE DO THIS JOURNEY

Thessaloniki station has a lil orthodox corner to light candles in – and an ancient photo booth. Feels like a film set – frozen when the debt happened. Trains have only been reconnected for a few months (post-recession) but it felt pretty India. As it did walking around the bus station later looking for a hotel and finding one with wallpaper over damp and mirrored ceiling tiles – we didn’t get an hourly rate.

Now at the back of a bus going past lush lakes and small fields on the northern coast of Greece – it explains so much having travelled here from the north, over the mountains, rather than flying straight to holiday central.

My big idea for the day is a philanthropic index – where tax and CSR is rated per individual. Everyone needs to do something for others. Alex doesn’t agree with me.

There are clouds across the higher hills as we head into a valley towards Turkey. What the fuck are they doing there? I do not want to see clouds for the next week. I want to turn off – see the temp rise as the minutes strike up from my first coffee in the mornings. I want the blue and white of postcards. I want the pictures in the guidebook. We’re getting a boat from Kavala, pop to Thassos or Samoraki, we’ll leave for the other if they’re too full of package holiday makers, what a weird phrase. Make like it’s a holiday, dudes.

The bus driver’s music is quiet though the air con, Chilli peppers, Guns n Roses, classic soft rock – a long way from where we started. 22km to go. Proper info travel seeing the baltic wilds, the chipped communist faces, German trains exporting cereals.

After a ferry, and a bus, I’m lying on a bed looking at weird Christmas cards framed on the walls – pictures sent from early explorers to this island, an island now overrun by Romanians. It came as a surprise – to get to a beach recommended in an out of date guidebook that you now can’t see for people. CLAUSTROPHOBIA – GET ME OFF THIS ISLAND. Seeing every beach stacked out by cafe owners’ umbrellas and sun loungers, offered for a minimum spend of 25E. So much water falling from the sky now – explains these verdant crags. These domineering hags. These green salads. A wood fire around a fig tree, grape vines, roofs sucking up the skies, sealine and clouds hazed together. My Nike insoles blown to sea. Heavier and heavier the rain and sailboat masts ticking geiger faster. Sun-dried pine replaced with pools of needles and burning logs. Men running under parasol shades and warmed by mama in towels. Water on marble. Olives falling over crazy-paving. Waves bashing over the Byzantine ruins, sandy beaches finally free of peeing children and mothers watching whilst dads channel Olympic swimmers past. This place is not for travellers like us – it is a place of reservations and organised families. But half the ferries no longer run, victims of the recession pushed by the loans offering greatness – so it’s hard to leave.

Giola pool is used on all the guidebooks to Greece – it looks bigger in pictures. Jumping in from quartz diving boards carved by the ocean into this natural round pool, filled with still sea water. Scores of people. Freeform. On a moto – no shades, trying to find an unknown beach, a place to recluse. This restaurant old, with rooms above all with the beauty of Aliki from its sights. A family palace, a unit. Something we don’t have. And then it stops and the island is bathed in sunlight.

Bread and stew go in the fire oven – I feel part of a Greek family – fuck banks – we’re in cashland – why would greeks on an island do anything other.

Moving house – moving house. The place was only available for two nights, we’d tried 6 others prior to this, used to rocking up and seeing what’s available. In a cheap place with another dodgy mattress, booked with a 14-year old spotty kid, his mum apologises for him when she drives our stuff around to the next place we found – it’s hard, getting rooms here. All the Romanians have booked in advance. We hang with some Romanian academics – they’re not coming back next year – too busy. The climate is not of the south islands – yet the sea is stunning and blue and the sun warms the stones so it’s perfect for naked midnight swims.
If we’re up that late.

Now we’re on Kinira Beach – the woman who only speaks German, and Greek, is OCD clean. Not a grain of sand is in the wrong place. We have balconies at the back and front and the sea is loud and hypnotic through the window. Proper mattresses – personal kitch – not blue and white though – here she’s gone for fleshy pink and white. BASTARDS (I WANTED BLUE AND WHITE – that’s why we came to Greece. It was here or Croatia, after the wedding – but we’d had our honeymoon in Mykonos/Anti-Paros/Serifos last year and were keen to feel as good again – and the journey here was worth this disappointment).

RAIN, CLOUDS, GO AWAY.

Epic travel frazzle. From Kinara to Poptos by moped with all our luggage and both of us. It began raining heavily. Potos – nice baclava lady feeds us in her cool Pretty Sweets shop (or something ) all Farrow n Ball colours. Not as good as the stuff we had in the mountain village – but we needed that woman’s spirit. Potos – skala Prinon by bus. Whisky stop for Alex, more camosmile tea for me. Skala Prinos to Kavala by boat. Now on bus to Salonikia.

So we did 2 nights in Aliki Archodika Restaurant, long hike to stony beach by food and they made everything from bread to olive oil on site, was well worth it and the view from the storm has all come back through writing this.

1 night of miscomm at Dolphins on Kinar – gets super- advanced bookings and final 3 nights in Kinara Clean Obsessed, next to Hotel Sylvia.

Makedonia Palace hotel at Thess. I hate arriving after the pool and sauna have shut. Top breakfast. Would return.

We had champagne cocktails by the beach in Navona, the restaurant, and later found a jewish rock bar, full of rich kids, next to a squat a few blocks back…

Paror Calor.

x

LONDON TO NANCY (and Dunkirk, Luxembourg, Belgium) in a campervan // TRAVEL WRITING

OCCUPY HITCHERS, ALPHABETIC ABSTRACT ART THAT MAKES SENSE & OVER 60s CREW REQUIRED –  Kirsty Allison does a whirlwind camper trip to a canal near Nancy, losing keys in Luxembourg, breaking down in Belgium – finally finding peace in Dungeoness.

The hippy hitchers think I’m a Buddhist.  Telling me about a commune where kids grow up without adult supervision, 800 of them.  800?  Babysat by Buddha?  Checking Stoner-pedia, dudes…

IN GOV WE TRUST

Jakub and Gem looked the part, that’s obvz why I picked them up.  Anarchic warriors, bright as his red T-shirt, which bears radical calls in frat-house lettering, Jakub pulls the obligatory beanie on and off and on, off and on.  He’s clean shaven with a billy goat’s gruff of a beard.  He looks perfect with Gem: fresh as the blonde dreds she’s paid for, Teva sandals, hippy skirt, layers of T-shirts, huge outdoor smile.  She does horticulture in Poland, where they’re both from.

Waiting strategically at the car entrance to the ferries at Dover – their sign says Calais, I’m going to Dunkirk, but we’re drawn together: I’m driving Freddy, a mid-90s Nissan Vanette. Same engine as a Datsun Sunny.  No one will provide breakdown insurance.  What’s the worst thing that can happen at a max speed of 55mph? Converted by a boat builder, styled by myself, Freddy has day of the dead cushions, star curtains and seats covered in deck chair fabric.  Scooby stripes were lovingly sprayed a couple of years ago, on a campsite in the Pyrenees (admittedly noxious – around all the organic chickens which the dog chased).  Beneath an upside-down tub on the roof, a thick white shower curtain crumples up for extra ceiling height when you stop and invite the giants in.  It has to be roped-down or it flies off.  Freddy has water, a cooker, a bed, music.  What more do you need?   I like being at one with the flowers and decomposing ground, or running over the dunes in the Camargue, past wild white horses – into the sea, the bath of the med, after a week of wild camping down from the Alps,  skinny-dipping in the purest of cold rivers.

There’s no extra cash needed by the ferry company, DDFS, for the extra passengers – only passports.  Yup, I’m passing through with the resistance – Jakub squats in the Occupy building in London.

“What’s going on with the movement at the moment?”

“Nothing…”  Off the record, there are paradoxes within every organisation.

“Do you have to contribute to the ideology as a resident?”

“No.  But for the last couple of years I’ve been working in the trance parties.  We were about to do a three day festival, but after the kid died in Croydon, we called it off.”  Glad to know the leaders of subcultural politics are being responsible about bombing kids with drugs.  Psychedelic uprisings, at the very least, carry the risk of labelling you as opponents to our moral leaders.  Value war?  Sure good start, yes, standing against them, in a warehouse –  if your brain gives a shit.  Just remember to read the label: a bucket load of psychedelics enables critical thinking, just don’t ever call it paranoia, call it truth.  You stand in danger of becoming a conspiracy theorist forever, and in my experience, drugs take up a lot of time.  Far better to get into something more modern, like ISIS, or Call of Duty, or Facebook, or the propaganda of a binge-watch…

This leads Jakub and I to the standards of squat parties being lower in the UK than across Europe.  Having one toilet for 700 people seems acceptable in England.  He suggests governments make money from drugs in the Eastern countries.  The mafia all tied in.  Can’t imagine a mafia house having only one loo.

You have been warned kids – there’s shit out there that’s addictive…find what you like, let it kill ya.  Those repetitive beats, they get in yer mangled head!

We watch the cliffs fall back into the horizon, hanging at the back of the deck.  You know you can only see 12 miles at sea?

I went to a bar on the boat and edited my novel (it has a lot of drugs in it).  We met again and I drove the wrong way off the boat at Dunkerque – French signage was without names of towns, as ever.  I end up driving them down to Calais because there are no petrol stations to dump them at – and that’s it – toodle pip.  Hitching is a good lesson in making the most of life, as you’re never likely to see each other again.  I spent a summer in the 90s hitching around England, hustling pool, sleeping in old ruins.

Through the night – I failed to read the signs – the cats eyes, flashing white like a discotheque – it is Saturday night.  I feel I am on slow zig-zags towards Paris, when I’m trying to get down to Nancy.  I end up pulling into the car-park of a neon green bar, just as Mr Allo Allo is going to the trash.  It’s 11.30pm.  He lurches towards me, pupils wide.  It is his car park, and my vehicle is hardly undercover.  My dog is going ballistic, Rosie, a two-year old Patterdale.  She’s a good wingman.

ROSIE THE ROVER AT DOVER

 

Bon soir.  I try explaining that I am Ca Va and looking at the map, GPRS on my phone is pulsing, heartbeat.  He doesn’t leave.  I feel like a woman with blonde hair, alone, in a camper van.

“Est il ya une probleme?” I ask, forcefully.  Non.  He fucks off.  But sends out a couple of young, short-haried buffoons – “Lose?” they ask and again, Rosie is going berserk.

“Non.   Ca va.”  Je ne suis pas loose.  Freaked out, I reverse.  Van roams the lanes.  Stop roadside to make a duck egg scramble after connecting the new gas to the built-in cooker.  The only food I brought are a couple of eggs.  Thought I’d stop and stock up on French swag, but with the hippies…

The sustenance helps me make the choice to get on the Peage.  I loathe paying for motorways when there are roads that loosely skirt the same route – in a vehicle that goes so slowly, the promised speed is of little advantage – but I opt for the ease of a more direct route and stop at an Aire – tucking up for the night, pulling the curtains close, using my torch to read beneath the blanket.  I don’t want to draw attention to myself.  There are a few lorry drivers, sleeping, only getting out to piss – but I’d rather our paths don’t meet.

 

LAY A LITTLE EGG FOR ME

 

Sunday 6th July 2014

We woke in the Aire layby, well- rested.  It is now Sunday morn – Rosie has skinned a tennis ball while I’ve done some some yoga.  I take her for a little wander,  playing my harmonica, she sings along to it.  Always brings me to think it’s one of the most precious moments.  She’s now lying on the words above these, in my notebook. I always write travel journals by hand.  That’s why it’s different to the writing I do on a word-processor, moving words, and sentences around all the time till they find their best order…

We must put some miles behind us.

Getting to Lens, there’s a Louvre museum outpost – the sign makes it look expensive and expansive and all big glass – so we sail through and it’s only when I escape the Peage, having chatted to some Manx bikers whom I subsequently pass back and forth all day, that I see a sign for a Musee de Matisse in the town he was born in, Le Cateau Cambresis.  In my survivial level French, I find a bank, pick up enough words to think I have the gist of a sentence, which of course can send en deviations, wandering misled, through the country, but I arrive at the Musee de Matisse explaining I am a journalist without a press card and I would like to come in (ie. for free) – and places of culture are free across France on the first Sundays of the month anyway.

Amazing collection.  Chagall donations, etchings and pop art coloured painting, Giacometti, the Picasso, the Rothko.  An explanatory journey of Matisse whom I did a project on at art school, or before, A-levels with the printmaker, Peter Smith, the teacher who stopped me getting thrown out.  It was in the days before Wiki, and I was so comforted by some bad information I’d picked up somewhere, saying he was in his 40s before he started painting.  It’s untrue.  He was in his 20s.  But there’s still solace in George Elliot not publishing her first till she was 40.  Mark Twain, 41.  With my book trajectory taking as long a Ralph Ellison, I question whether it’s because of my love of wandering.  Into situations and galleries such as this.  Strolling through another’s practice of still lives.  Fortunately brief, and then his Windows – one I’ve never seen with a rude nude.  I notice the same strumpet whores, and models and wife, Amelie, with their faces painted into pictures on the walls he’s sketched, and these women working themselves into photos of his homes with huge line sketches of faces en the ceiling and stencils of those geranium-style shapes and birds, like McQueen’s recent silver bird logos.

HERBIN’s SAYING SOMETHING – PEACE, LOVE, UNITY

And another discovery – my new fave artist – Auguste Herbin: all Thomas Moore Utopia font and geometric pre-pop/Mondrian-esque placing.  Incredibly, he has devised an alphabet around shapes and colour – coded triangles and circles and squares, in different colours and orders – he then spells out names such as Peace, Love and Union, using nothing more than his representational colours and shapes. The paintings make sense.  They are more than abstract compositions.  J’adore.  And another new artist (to me) Genevieve Claisse – a French Bridget Reilly.  All black and white and angles and some gorgeous circles – again called Union.  The museum was perfectly designed with Eames chairs and stained glass by Josef Albers.  I remember visiting the Chapelle de Vence with my parents as a child – mind-blowing stained windows by Matisse.  Art rules.

I NEVER PROMISED YOU A HERBIN GARDEN

UNION BY AUGUSTIN HERBIN

HERBIN GOES BANANAS

EASY AS A, B, PARIS

MATISSE IS SO LIONEL RICHIE: He’s drawing on the ceiling

POST-CAVEMAN STENCIL ART

I WAS TRYING TO DRAW A HAND

Wear that chair like you just don’t care

HOT WALLS

HOT TEXT: HERBIN ALLISON

HOT JAZZY PIANO BY AUGUSTE HERBIN

LIKE A CIRCLE IN A SPIRAL, LIKE A WHEEL WITHIN A WHEEL, THIS CANVAS IS EXISTENTIALIST, A REFLECTION OF A PILL

WINDOWS BY ALBERS, Josef Albers

Windows by Matisse, Henri Matisse

I’m so sketchy

Chagall gull

Chagall sheep

Chagall chuck

LEGER primaries

 

 

So Herbin demonstrates the line from 80s Pompidou and Mondrian.  And I walk out of the Musee de Matisse, spellbound by everything France can be – there’s a charming bistro, undoubtedly selling Stella, perfectly cold, with crunchy and soft calming lettuce salad and frites.  An old Citroen, grey, wartime-looking, parked in front of the beauty of the town, of France – the je ne sai quoi, ah, j’adore – I step in dog shit.

I clean my Nike in the ville fountain.  Buy some frites mayonnaise.  We’re near Belgium, Rosie won’t eat potatoes.  Atkins dog.  We leave.

I’d planned to stop at Charleville Mezier – but it looked industrial north.  It’s the funniest part of travelling, the towns you don’t stop in – on appearances, often.*

Instinctively, I had to follow La Route de Rimbaud et Verlaine – obvz – I pull over (in a contemporary poet pit-stop, an industrial estate backing onto the countryside – door on camper is flung open, dog can wander safely).  It’s only when I’m reclining, reading Donna Tartt in the back of the van that I see why the hippy hitchers took me to be a Buddhist – my loo roll in the van hangs off a necklace on the back of the passenger seat.  I was given it.  And I realise they were looking at its giant Buddha head pendant.

The landscape changed 50 clicks back, from the dangerous Norfolk flats of Dunkirk have vanished for verdant mounds and rolling Roman roads.  The churches vary from orthodox-esque mosque-y bumps to Bavarian castles with multi-turrets to Baroque greys and simpler chapels.  Most are curvy and sexy with those gorgeously well maintained houses / chateaux in the centre ville with iron filigree or cut -out metal decorative gates – there’s some shite too, bad PVC conservatories adjoined to otherwise perfect farmhouses – chip shop squalor.  I like the make-do metal and bumpy glass porches, different panels in diff colours of glass.

It’s nearly 5 o’clock – I must try to edit a lil film as part of a pitch I want to send in tmw – for £20K or more.  [It’s worth noting that I never even received a thank you for submission and stressed myself with shite internet and completing this film for the whole time I was away – GRANTS SUCK].

 

J’ADORE A BIT OF FRENCH WALL-ART

 

On Sunday night, the rain hit hard on Freddy – the windows mist – I break the silence of my thoughts and the engine with an album by Adam Ant – one that I’ve left for the time when I had space to listen.  We’ve hung out recently  – he’s got great stories, is ultimately cool, yet knows his worth which can make him hilarious.  Another time – but I played him and let his lyrics reveal his bruised angelic sides and male mania.  I sang along to the instrumental, finding a voice in myself I had not found before, driving through the country, stopping at industrial mosaics and ceramic stone circles in remembrance of dug up children lost in two mine collapses on the same site.  There are so many memorials to dead soldiers on this side of France – bordering Germany and Luxembourg, over to Belgium – it’s depressing – it all looks like a set from Band of Brothers yet the archetypal squares where I can take a coffee and croissant are rare – particularly this side of Longuyens, where it suddenly changed to being alpine.

Before darkness comes, I need to eat –  the Turks in the kebab shop gave a plate of meat for Rosie.  I tipped them well, running back to the van in the rain.  They understood a travellers journey and sympathised my lack of language with charm and humour.  Ma Francais est en Angleterre.  It pissed down in twilight – passing the Pharmacie Marx and trying to find a place to stop for the night in Chatel de Saint Germain, or a room in the castle would have been nice – so beautiful but I ended up caught in one way hell of bungalows before heading down to Metz and finding a cycle path in darkness with the moon shining on the Moselle.

 

I KNOW YOU’RE WATCHING

MONDAY

I woke so early, I’d slept badly, imagining my brutal murder – being cut up to kebab brochette du poulet – I’d locked all the doors and drawn the starry red and white curtains but the door could be prised open.  Waking early, I skirted the Moselle – down to Nancy – my relatives told me they lay a couple of hours east.   Through alpine Coronation Streets, all with no perfect cafes, all Merthyr Tydfils, hamlets and one chicken towns.  And my people were nowhere.  I’d only travelled for 500 miles.  I asked in the Captainerie if they had been through, a Dutch barge, OUI OUI OUI –  sent off in the wrong direction.  Its amazing that one can lose such a large boat.  I eventually called from a lock, several miles away, which I had walked to, carrying gifts from Fortnum’s and tonnes of magazines and the weekend papers – the dears’ starved of reading such things.

Aboard, the smell of contentment – of smells they don’t notice.  Home.  There are fresh flowers cut, and sofas, and tonnes of books.  It’s all very ship shape.  And we set sail, on this floating cottage, overflowing with chilli plants and herbs and flowers.  A two-berth boat, each with their own bathroom.  Between each bedroom lies a lounge and kitchen, most travellers have a television satellite which they’ll spend time pointing through trees towards home. I have an amazing hot shower.  The only problem is Freddy, having to borrow a silly fold-up bike to bring him back to our new mooring.  It’s about 10 clicks.  There are few buses around these parts.

A gay couple – of Swiss descent, on a gorgeous boat, are moored aside.   I don’t want to talk.  I am wound up by the pressure of getting here, maybe needing to return too fast.  And the deadline for the grant application.  Perhaps I’ll stay a little longer.

CAPT. BEEFHEART SALAD

WEDNESDAY

We travel from Xures – Einville.  It’s raining, but beautiful to chug along the canal.  Life can be so relaxing.  Although, I have to bring Freddy back to the new location again, 15k, this time borrowing a bike from Qantas Suicide Pilot and Alex Gibbons.  These two shipmates, each with peniches well over 20 metres, and several bicycles between them, they travel together on their huge houses – beautiful Fidutia and Unity, full of geraniums.  We’re moored next door and all stop for a drink together.  The inland waterways board demands two crew to be essential on any journey on boats as large as theirs.  So they roll along together.  Advertising everywhere for fe-company, to rare avail.  Over 60s-only!  Such nice guys.  “Dog rolls over, just like my ex-wife” – etc etc.  Funny. Get in touch!  They cook, they travel, better than living cooped up by yourself, no?  Even for a few weeks, they wouldn’t even need rent…You could paint pictures on the back of their boats.  It’s a healthy life.

I used to work for these guys

 

Later that day, I walk into Nancy.  Stanislas Square, drips with filgree gold. It’s Venetian in scope and Parisian in grandeur.  But we were hit with awful weather. The only clothes I bought with me were a load of summer dresses, and it’s waterproof trouser weather – been working on the pitch.  Now back to Donna Tartt.  xxx

STANISLAS SQUARE, NANCY

HARK – IS THAT THE SOUND OF AN ONCOMING TOUR DE FRANCE?

Thursday

Did a flight of 10 locks or so, up the embranchement de Nancy – currently moored near a grand chateau of Fleville – iron gates and silver roofs of imperialism – grain for land – guys in a cafe do peace signs as I drive past in the van.  Sad to leave so soon.

 

NICE WHEELS

 

Friday 11th July

Lost my keys in Luxembourg – kinda thing that makes you double aware of the people on the street and the women with too much time on their hands.  I’d stopped at Metz shortly before 1pm to send this application – the video was too phat – the wifi too thin – I sat outside Mac Ds, with lil german girls taking my pic as I attempted to upload the film which would never load.  Compressed it, emailed that it’ll be up on Dropbox by Monday.  Metz is a stunning micro Paris with uber Goth cathedrales, rivers, narrow pedestrian streets and I ate vietnamese with Rosie in the church yard which sat in the split of the river like Notre Dame.  Driving out I saw a campsite by the Moselle that I’d loved to have stopped at – and would have if I didn’t have to be at work on Tuesday, I have to deliver a lecture…

It would have been a good idea to stop because as I write this, Freddy has just survived one of those weather driving experiences of having a tornado whizzing towards you in the front and the wing mirrors showing lightning spikes on dark grey behind you.  Christ.  So I found my keys in Luxembourg – having retraced, they’d been handed in to the guy with the shop selling souvenirs and keyrings with climbing caribas, the kind of thing I should have had my keys joined onto in the first place…I stopped to admire the lush ravine gardens and grey fairy castles creeping up the other other side, to another land.  Walking through the square in Luxembourg – jazz played.  Safe jazz.  There were rebels against the clear conservatistism everywhere – kids in blacked out Jaguars  – finest clothes on show, hip-hop ghetto blasting, on a Friday nite.  The kind of place keys get handed in.

LATER

The good thing about breaking down in a camper van is you have somewhere to sleep.  The dog was getting paranoid – looking at the road, realising the speed we were going at, 55mph – could kill her – I’d just spoken to Alex, my husband, back in London, and we, dependent on how he felt in the morn, were gonna meet in Dover or Hastings tmw night or Sunday morn.  I thought I’d truck on – make it to this swimming pool museum  in Roubaix – But I’ve fucked it – blown a gasket.  Gone too far – so wanted to stop earlier – should have.  The temp gauge was suddenly up – like at the top – I pulled over – the time it did this was just before Christmas eve, en route to drop the dog in the country before we went to LA for a while – I grabbed the dog and the wedding dress I thought I may be wearing in Vegas – was getting mum to hem it – and got out as it smoked.  There’s no smoke without fire, I was thinking today as I noticed wafts after letting it cool to crawl up the hard shoulder another 500m before stopping again – I opened the engine – it stank of death.  The doggy had her head out of the window – away from the mortuary – I sat in the back and pulled open the Hoegaarden I’d bought for 1E10 at the garage by the vet earlier. Petrol and it appears beer being a reason to visit Luxembourg – it was £30 for a full tank earlier.  Had my vehicle been tampered with?  I opened the engine, which is inside the van, between the two front seat.  Oil was fine as it had been earlier but I’d added water before leaving the boat.  I used the water can and it drank and drank over a litre.  Cool again.  I did another 500m up the hard shoulder before the temp gauge pinged.  My brother had forewarned me to try n get off motorways if something did go wrong.  I’m near a village, Courrieres.  Napoleon make a brandy here and I’m hoping there may be a garage.  I’m wearing an orange fluoro vest – a legal requirement in Spain, certainly, and the orange triangle is out and the hazards are flashing  Fuck.  The orange triangle has been blown over as the trucks fly past.  It’s gusty and raining – I have to get off the motorway.  500m to go.

That’s another 100m.  My eyes are burnt with the lights of the trucks that hurtle towards us.  I must get off this road.  I’ve got sore tits like my period’s about to start.  Christ.  I’ve made it to the stem of the off-shoot – the smoke hangs in the midnite air like we’re over a daybreak lake already – but we’re not.  We’re just burnt out road trash – I’m going up the junction with Rosie, see how far uphill is left.  The triangle is out.  Leave the hazards and light on.  Black slugs cover the road between Mailles and Courrieres.

Slowly, Freddy hobbles to safety, I pull him over on the side of a field, off the slipway up from the motorway.100m at a time.  I have no idea if I’m in Belgium or France.

BROKEN FREDDY

Yeah – I should have got here a lil earlier…

Deep moments

CLIMB ANY MOUNTAIN

THE NEXT DAY

I’ve walked a few miles to a garage which is closed and now have to get to another.  If a bus comes to Namur, 20 kilometres away, I’ll get on it. Saturday today.  If anything happens, it has to happen today – it’s Bastille celebrations tomorrow.  And as my French relative oft says, Everything closes on Mondays.  I think I’m in Belgium.  There are German looking flags for the FA Cup Final tmw.  I consider that I will have to leave the van, and get up to Holland, where I can get a boat with the dog to Liverpool Street.  You’re not allowed to take dogs on the Eurostar.

E411 Junction.

And then I find a garage in the middle of this Norfolk desert – a young native guy is manning the car wash.  He even speaks a little English.  His boss will return soon, despite it saying the place is closed on Saturday.

I wait and wait.

The mechanic only gets embarrassed as the dog chases a frog, un grenuile, leaping about, in their back porn room…women looking hot on paper. The Belgium mechanic is amazing.  He shows me where the water tube had split, having pulled the van right up 6 feet above us.  He checks everything over, and I feel safe.  He explains it all to me, where the smoke had come from, and yes, of course there was smoke without fire.  We communicated in French, and I pay happily.

I stop, now starving, in Mons “city of culture 2015” – ie.  the last town in Belgium, with a prison on the way in.  It’s got a long way to go – they always label the shitest, no-hope towns aspirationally – desperate it’ll bring new investment to places with destroyed industries.  The culture is largely of five euro shoe shops and shut down businesses.  Cheap fabrics and cheap waffles, gauffres – leige ou Bruxelles.  I love the gauffres.  And the lights of Levis and The Body Shop, oh, I wish I did not wander around stores looking for the answers, but could wage my eyes heavy beyond their attention-seeking neons. Be undistracted in this cobble-streeted town.  Full of medieval wander and amazing architecture.  Proof that capitalism destroys culture.  I gobble a waffle, decidedly better than the service station one earlier, after Manur, and the saviour mechanics in the village of nothing.  Thank you so much.

THE FRENCH ONES LOOK MORE LIKE HG WELLS’ TRIPODS

 

SUNDAY MORNING

I could keep this show on the road for a long time – yet I’m back on British soil – happy to have returned.  We reached Calais when the evening light broke with the first sun I’d seen for days, England promised beauty.  Once aboard, the islands shone through a Turner haze. I’d walked Rosie around a lake prior to leaving and also made it to the Roubaix art museum in an art deco swimming pool – blagged it in as a journalist – ran around in 15 minutes – all the naked statues of women around the bath – it was funny, like being in a decadent hotel or Arabic lodge.  Roubaix is industrial – I considered moving there – so much to rent – art nouveau industrialia – warehouses more delapidated than the deco of Berlin.  There was a poet’s cave – it’s just the street art was a bit shit.  Everyone showcases in London but I could defo hang in Roubaix for a while.  Slow.  Write.  The pieces in the gallery were like a hall of fameless – so many romos and impressionists who made little impression on the international hit lists of collectibles.  The only things I recognise are Majolica vases and tiles.  There are studies for portraits – hundreds of portraits – the pictures that carried the known artists’ names, the pieces that this old town can afford. I wonder whether it’s profligacy, or being first that preserves the great artists, as there are so many beautiful pieces here, by lesser knowns.

ROUBAIX DECO NAKED STATUES

ROUBAIX POET’S CAVE

ROUBAIX PRE-RAPH LOAFERS

PIERRE ROCHE TILES

Driving through, looking for this place, I notice a museum of the working class – does this mean they are dead?  In Mons, yes.

We sleep by Rye Harbour.  I brought the shite weather with me.  I’m gonna go down to Hastings now.  Meet my husband.  See my friend, walk on the beach.  Had a bad dream, woke in terror – this journey has been part dexedrine, part valium.  Too much in too little time.

On Monday, we slept by yellow sea poppies and giant sea cabbages under the big skies of Dungeoness.

Did I tell you my keys went missing Luxembourg.  Ahoy? xxx

DUNGEONESS, Kirsty Allison

YOU AND ME, KID, WE’RE GOING PLACES

 

My bag doth protest

ATHENS: beautiful day philosophising with Vassilis Haralambidis who runs Bios – soon opening a new space, in an edgier area, continuing his natural propagation of cultural agendas.

We first met when I was writing about the Design Walk for Dazed.

He’s creating workspaces and a union of designers from all fields. They also have a great bar and club for performances etc.

It all fits with the whole Something Out Of Nothing concept that we’re articulating at Red Gallery in Shoreditch, London.

On the plane to Belgrade after, I found these in the airport magazine, which I adore:

Yannis Karlopoulos demo bag

These geezers bonded over Fasolada westerns – Greek bean soupers – spaghetti for Olympians – high quality Greek productions with classic soundtracks by Vangelis and Yiannos Spanos.

Dazed

3:AM

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/3am-asia-rise-of-the-nu-mohemians/

Rise of the New Mohemians

Tokyo’s streets are a homage to sci-fi fantasy, seventies style. Fields of mirrored skyscrapers are snaked by webs of towering monorails, glass-fronted mainstreet superstores flash with phosphorescent adverts. But like every Big Brother backdrop, a revolution occurs a few alleys back from the sheen, and in Tokyo, mazes of traditional cubed houses hold a variety of secret Steppenwolf doorways.

Behind one such door in the North of the city is a library bar with vintage issues of Visionaire and opulent Japanese-edition fashion photography books, it stands as a temporary salon for writers who don’t use pen & papers, or laptops, they write novels on their mobiles.

Drinking an £8 coffee, Ryu, king of the new ‘mohemians’, explains how he came to be credited as the first m-novelist,

“It came from necessity, I was working in a bar in Shibuya where the girls with the orange faces are” begins the 23 year old whose profits from his first m-book have allowed retirement to a desert island, where he’s profoundly in love with the local delicacy of octopus balls. In broken English and through a translator he goes on to tell how he felt disturbed by the repetitive cycle of observing chicks arriving to the scene, enticed by the appeal of darker life, slipping into a world of wrist-cutting, drugs, prostitution, debauchery and occasional degradation.

From his bar he assembled a team of groupies who spilt their stories to him. He emerged as a writer making notes on his phone about the new faces’ demise. “I sent the first notes and chapters to girls fresh to the area as cautionary tales, they told their friends, and their friends” Using emoticons to signify character moods and shortcuts of text speak, he uploaded test chapters to a website which got downloaded to phones. Ryu’s high octane writing appealed to girls across Japan, the site received unprecedented traffic and a paperback publisher soon clocked the sounds of the underground; his maverick m-novel, Tokyo Real, went on to sell three million hard copies, 32 million have been issued via the website.

“I didn’t plan to begin as a counsellor, or a writer, but the notes on my phone became chapters. The book was then published and it was made into a film, manga and anime.”

This organic progress has now been gazumped by market manipulators, and Tadashi Izumi, who has a PhD in Victorian literature from Cambridge, and Honjo Sae, who formerly wrote traditional books, have picked up on techniques to exploit this new market, they’re at the helm of this epoch which sees around three million people across Japan self-publishing in this way, students are it, teachers do it in their lunch time. In a society where texting is way more polite than speaking on the phone in public, it’s an acceptable form of creativity that fits in your pocket. The process operates in one of two ways, either via subscription, where users sign up for a certain amount of content a month for however many yen, or they give it away free. Apparently giving it away for free is favoured, as with most creative acts on the web.

Tadashi Izumi recognised the largest audience being teen girls, so began writing stories specifically for this audience, cannily, he also designed merchandise ready to rock.

“It’s a marketing dream,” says Tadashi, “The audience have time on their hands, they are always on their phones, killing time. We call them the Oyayubizoku generation (the thumb tribe). I created merchandise to tie in with Crossroads, my first m-novel. The characters wore a perfume and necklaces already available in the shops when the book was launched online. They thought they were real, pre-existing products, but the book worked as a kind of advertisement’ he says.

Crossroads sold 2m copies in just one week, the website receives around 12million hits per month. Izumi’s follow up book, Cross Overhas a diamond necklace available in select boutiques which sells from 100 000 yen (over £700), he’s trying to break into an older demographic. “Shakespeare would have been a mobile novelist” he claims.

Honjo Sae was recruited by Japan’s biggest record label, AVEX to write stories which include members of bands, as a cross-promotion, multi-platform, 360 PR megamix.

“You have a smaller screen space,” she explains of the Keitai Shousetsu which are fast spreading across China and Taiwan, “It’s all about action, less description, and the sentences have to be short, with spacing to fit on the screen”. Honjo calls herself and Ryu ‘non-fiction novelists’ as they are picking the truth from real life and interpreting them back to the public. Fantasy is everyday for Tokyo people. This is the tech age where several generations cite all their heroes as cartoon characters. Atom Boy is cooler then Elvis. So manga houses are also providing hand drawn cartoons exclusively for the phones, there are m-soap operas, m-films, m-street art, customised screen savers and Comic Studio software which allows consumers to develop plots for all mediums where they are the protagonist. We are living in the future, and the immediacy of technology suits Japan’s mohemians, it’s a culture that embraces the moment. Tokyo is a socially connected city where a walk through town is like being in the ‘Ray of Light’ disco video, or maybe that’s the sleep deprivation, Daft Punk gone crazy.

Yet aside to tech love there is a tradition for respect which permeates everything from the one-to-one love binds of seaweed around sushi, where the consumption is intimate, dark, with low slung opium smoking seats to recline upon to suck the exquisite delights of Bachannalian feasts, where plethoras of health and happiness are served alongside iced jasmine tea, with or without alcohol, Kobe beef gently fed by the tit of people who want to eat happy cows, parma ham wrapped around samphor type of asparagus, creamy tofu with sesame sauce, pork steeped in dark illicit concoctions, and the finest tuna sashimi. A pool of heated water to have blanched mushrooms and soup or the temples of such world class gastronomic havens as chef Jeff Ramsey’s 25 course tasting menu on the 36th floor of the Mandarin Oriental, where views of red flashing lights create organized patterns in which to try and understand the city. It’s a joy to taste and behold. And perhaps this ritualistic respect related to the very art of writing, and communication and the painstaking skill required to use the pictorial scripts. The pride and manners expected from one another are perhaps a route of this servitude reflected in digital society, which sits within pleasuredomes of simplicity and intellect demonstrated at places such as the 2121 Design Sight, (a masterpiece cocoon to the art of design by Tadao Ando and Issey Miyake). It’s not as easy as ABC. But this complexity leads us to wonder how many adaptees to m-writing will blossom overseas. In Europe we’ve probably all now got friends who have bought a zillion classics for a fiver for their Nintendo DS, and perhaps downloaded some of the sample chapters that are getting provided digitally as promos from companies like Canongate. Transworld last year pioneered a programme of texting in for chapters, which proved moderate success, HarperCollins have the e-experimental imprint, The Friday Project, and 3 are adopting socially networked technology such as Skype calls to allow us to all integrate into the future and apply these Mohemian ways with handsets like the INQ. Soon the Espresso machine will print titles on demand in bookshop, to order – you want Lolita on pink paper in ten minutes, you got it. This means less shelf space, more data space.

The old guard will always prefer a book. But the advantages of being able to adapt screen colours, font size are incredible for the dyslexic or visually impaired. Also, as a study aid, or for those who like to flit behind a hundred books at once, the e-book is the answer, you can carry a library in your handbag. Genius.

But how many writers can give up words for text-speak is yet to be seen. There are numerous companies exploring ways to use mobiles to market novels designed for traditional paperback, particularly bestselling brand authors like Andy McNab although it may be left to indie kids to invent new ways with words, and today is our playground for the future.

Thanks to Takeshi Miura and Akiko Hamaoka for translation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kirsty Allison started writing professionally as a teenager on Loadedand Dazed in 1994. Her fiction has appeared in Ambit andKatalogue. She has recently been performing poems around London. She has been working on a novel set in 1990s Shoreditch since the 1960s.

Kirsty Allison travelled to Tokyo with 3snapshots.com

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Saturday, May 16th, 2009.