buddha – Juanito's Travels

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker Zen Cleaning Robot, fiestas, mas drama y thinking of moving to County Sligo 1995/2022 BlogPt11

2022

I haven’t focussed on why I started this blog for a while, that is planning for my 50th birthday world trip. It turns out planning a 50th trip is a lot more complicated than planning a 22 year-old trip. When I was 22, in 1995 – for most of the year at least, I turned 23 in December – I didn’t think about jobs, kids, any wives, retirement savings or anything like that. I was like a bird that could just fly off and sit in a tree for a while when the desire took me. A simple life. I could just pack my blue backpack with a few things and hit the road.

Now, I research guidebooks, try and find the best time to travel to fit in with plans to move back to my hometown of the Gold Coast in Queensland, while maintaining a job here in Canberra where I’ve worked for various departments of the Australian government for the last 15 1/2 years. Thinking, should I quit my job, get a payout, travel around the world and then return and try and find another job, or should I try and keep my Canberra job, use up all my Long Service Leave and Annual leave, travel the world, visiting my wife’s family in Mexico, and having a 50th birthday party, on the way, then return to the Gold Coast and find another job, hopefully with enough savings to live off until I do.

Life was much simpler in 1995 when I was 22 and 2022 was some freakishly high number I could hardly fathom, where the Zen Cleaning Robots had taken over all the mundane jobs of the world leaving us humans to just run around having fun in free houses, rather than post-pandemic fears, rising housing prices, and, just to keep it interesting, part II of the 1850s Crimean War where Russia fought the West (and Turkey) for control of Sevastopol and other such strategic places on the Black Sea, which has also managed to drive up the price of lettuces here in Australia to $10 a head.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, people need to learn history, how often seemingly forgotten events from hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago can affect us and influence the current era.

But back to 1995.

1995

I returned to Wexford one summer’s afternoon, after visiting Agatha, Ines and the girls in Dublin. I think for once I got the train back to Wexford, as I’d managed to save a small amount of money over the last months and I couldn’t be bothered trying to hitch. When I arrived back in Wexford I had to walk from Wexford town out to Inisglas, in The Deeps, around 14-15 kms.

About halfway back the blackest of black clouds covered the sky which, moments earlier, had been clear blue and sunny. It was a most ominous sight. It came out of nowhere. Maybe not nowhere, it seemed to be from the direction of the Irish Sea. The elements erupted. A gale started blowing. Rain started pouring from the sky. The world turned black. Black as the night’s sky. Then the lightning started. Lighting strikes came down every 3-4 steps. 1,2,3 then a thunderous thunder clap. 1,2,3 and the ground shook like an electric bomb, and then another, and then some more. So loud. Whipping down from the heavens with a crack so intense it made my spine shiver, my hands shake. So terrified. I didn’t dare look up to see where the lighting was landing. It was close. Metres away close. No gap between the light and sound. No time to count to 1. How close to death I was, any step now I thought. I walked closer to the trees hoping they might take the brunt of any lighting strike, pulling my chin to keep the rain from my chest. No escaping it though. I kept walking. 20 terrifying minutes or so later, looking at my feet, drenched with rain. It was gone. Quiet. Just for the sounds of the water dropping from the leaves of the trees.

I can’t remember many times I felt so close to death than those 20 minutes. Apart from the time the Thai Airways’s plane’s engines had failed – twice – after coming out of Bangkok a few months earlier. Or that time Luke had boiled up a whole bag of magic mushrooms that Matt had picked on his birthday and put in the freezer in the house we shared in Newcastle and given me a whole glass without alerting me to the phenomenal mind-fucking strength he’d made it. I mean most people just put in 3 or 4 mushrooms. That’s more than enough! What psycho puts a whole fucking kilo or something in? I ended up at a pizza shop that night asking a waiter to call an ambulance because I’d OD on mushies. But as I waited I saw a dog and started feeling better and decided to follow the dog to Sydney or somewhere.

Inisglas was also changing. The Buddha went on about change all the time. I would hear it everyday in my Vipassana mediation courses. Change, change. Everything’s always changing. If you get attached to things without recognising they will sooner or later change, you will be miserable.

I wasn’t feeling that miserable at the time, so perhaps I wasn’t that attached. But there were certainly changes afoot.

Nora and Stuart hooked up. Because Nora and Stuart hooked up, Frankie and I were now sharing the little space above or near the flour mill near Anthony and Eve’s house as Nora had moved to the main house. Frankie wasn’t too happy about the whole thing but he accepted it with sad dignity and continued to tend to the vegetable garden, even though most of the community, including myself, weren’t pulling their weight in that respect. Mind you I did continue to help Frankie out, picking veggies, mounding up potatoes, but it was more like a part time thing.

I also kept helping Stuart with the cow milking and yoghurt and quark making from time to time. Frankie helped me once when I drank a bunch of fresh unpasteurised milk straight from the milk bucket and ended up throwing up. He was a really nice guy. I think I’d discovered that day I might have also been intolerant to milk and asked Eve whether we could buy some soy milk during the weekly shopping run. Anthony, already upset that we had a freezer full of a dead cow that nobody was eating as we always made vegetarian meals, rolled his eyes in regards to the idea of milk intolerances. He also said Plato was dead set against people eating beans because it ruined their philosophical capacity or some crap like that. Sorry, but if the Buddha and Plato were in a fight the Buddha would shit on Plato and his beans any day, even when he was in his unhealthy self-deprivation period before he found the middle path.

Nora’s hooking up with Stuart meant Stuart’s son was getting more attention and being slightly less feral and pooing on the front lawn much less. But it meant Nora’s son getting a bit upset as he obviously as less attention was being given to him.

The kids in general were like community farm kids, roaming about like free range chickens most of the day and occasionally getting into trouble. One morning they all came in screaming and yelling and us adults all sprung into action wondering what the heck was going on. After more screaming it transpired that apparently they’d all been down to the beehives and decided to whack the sides of the beehives with sticks, which the bees objected to. They were covered in bee stings. I think the homoeopathic vet had some lotion to put on the hundreds of stings. They all survived.

The homoeopathic vet also gave a cow that had eaten too much clover, and was thus getting bloated, some plain old dishwashing detergent. She held her nostrils and poured it down her throat. You’d probably charge someone £50 for that.

Then there was Jay. Jay had bought himself a donkey, and a cart, and was making plans with Anushka, or whatever the quiet German girl’s name was, to travel around Ireland picking winkles and smoking grass, while kipping on the cart. He was going to leave in a few weeks. Just at the start of Autumn. Not that I had any idea at the time as I hadn’t read or seen Lord of the Rings, but it sounded a bit like something a hobbit would do.

Michael from Denmark was getting tired of Ireland. He was planning to go back to Denmark I think, or perhaps go work with the other Danish people at the disabled home, where, I think, his ex-girlfriend was still working, but where he’d also get a real wage, which was not forthcoming at Inisglas due to its philosophy of not really making money from the farm despite it’s great potential.

Tron was looking into some biodynamic program somewhere else in Ireland or Scotland or Norway or something, so was soon leaving the place.

Ross, being on the run from the UK police, was happy to keep low and remain in place with his chickens, baconers and porkers.

And I, well I had saved a little money, but I wanted to save more, so I started looking into WWOOFing opportunities elsewhere in Ireland where all my food and board was included, so I could save all my dole. I had found a place in my granny’s home County Sligo, in fact around the area of her home town Tubbercurry, also spelt Tobercurry on occasions. I was going there in a few weeks so I was getting ready for that.

But there would be one big event before that move happened.

Inisglas’ main manor house was in disrepair, and since the farm barely made any money, there was no way to fix it. So Stuart had the idea of organising a music festival where we could sell tickets and put the proceeds towards fixing the place.

He turned out to be quite the organiser and got a few local bands to play at the event for free. He even managed to get his friends from a band called Elephant Walk, or some name like that, a folk/ world music outfit who’d played at Glastonbury. So we had a pretty good line up. To add to that, the guys at Inisglas decide to perform a few songs ourselves. We decided on Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton, and two other songs I can’t remember. I was only singing choruses in those so I didn’t pay as much attention to them.

We decided for our performance we’d dress up like women. There was Frankie, Michael, Stuart and I, plus some googley-eyed German who’d recently arrived on the farm as a part of some farm stay thing he’d organised to learn biodynamic techniques. Tron was happy as he finally had someone on the biodynamic farm, besides Anthony and Eve who started the community, who was actually interested in biodynamics.

I liked Googly-eyed Person, but wasn’t there long enough to remember his name. He seemed like a good person.

We practised our songs for weeks and learnt all the words to Tears in Heaven which are still in my head somewhere today I’m sure. We did up posters, and put them up around town. Stuart got a spot on the local radio station to promote the event and after a few weeks, concert day was here.

It was a beautiful sunny day, though another summer storm threatened in the evening.

We decided that they Inisglas crew would start the event, so we donned our dresses like brides on a wedding day and made our way out for our big performance. Stuart had a nice slim dress which was in 1920s’ style. He even had a bit of lippy from Nora. Frankie, Michael and Googly-eyed German guy also had nice dresses. I was very happy with my dress, it was a lilac number, kind of thing you might see a Mexican woman wear on her sweet 15. I had really long hair, and the face of my great-grandmother from Sligo, so I think many in the crowd were thinking I might be the real deal, if it wasn’t for the obviously hairy legged men besides me. After Tears we had a more upbeat number and I went wild swinging my hair about. We had a ball.

The crowd was good and I think in the end we had a few hundred come along. We’d tried to get a liquor licence but were refused because we were holding the event on a Sunday, which was a harder day to get official permission to serve drinks given it was the Lord’s day. We got around the ‘law’ by having a game where you threw darts at a dart board, and if you hit a particular number we’d give you a free beer. It cost £3 to enter. After some confusion people realised the special number was any number, and even if you couldn’t hit the board we’d still give you a beer to console you. We kept making people throw the darts though as it was funny.

I’m sure if the liquor licensing people had come our whole scheme would have quickly fallen apart.

We also had sandwiches made with bread Michael and I had baked, some cheesy buns, also made at Inisglas, and home made cordial. Michael and I were the main bread makers at the time as Jay had moved more into beekeeping at that point and was prepping for his donkey-cart tour.

The rest of the real bands played throughout the evening and much craic was had by all. It did rain for a bit in the late afternoon and many of the families with young kids went off, leaving the harder core revellers. We ended up finishing up late into the evening smoking weed and drinking beers and wine by a big bonfire. It was like one of those wistful scenes at the end of some coming of age movie.

It was, really, the craic.

I decided to end on this high note, and in the days after, packed my bag and hitched up to Dublin to spend a few days with Agatha before heading to Sligo.

As it happened, Agatha had a friend who was coming to visit from Spain, so they’d organised a little trip through Northern Ireland and Donegal and were happy to drop me off at Tubbercurry, Sligo on the way back. So the universe was once again providing.

But just as change was happening at Inisglas, change was also happening at the Chaparrita in Dublin, and for me, most importantly, a change in my relationship with Agatha.

More of that in the next blog post though, I think finishing up Inisglas after a few months is also a nice spot to finish up this post.

P.s The Zen Cleaning Robot is a concept I came up with Rob Skelton at RMIT later in the nineties. I think it was for a school project on writing for the internet that started with a drunken night of wine and indoor soccer where I ended up sleeping at a house in Saint Kilda with the friend of a classmate who was growing a super awesome little weed plant grown from a seed form Holland.

I would have hoped Zen Cleaning Robots would be being manufactured by now.

Juanito’s Travels Cincuenta Años viaje – 1995 Vipassana Meditation in Herefordshire near Wales, UK BlogPt6

The first few days of meditation at the Vipassana Centre in Herefordshire didn’t have much impact.

It was like the demons of Bangkok and getting duped of all my money were just trying to rip my skin on their way out of my body while many more demons waited in queue. Rising and passing away.

For those who have never done a Vipassana meditation course, it’s not one of those relaxing visualisation things where you imagine butterflies and hummingbirds in green fields by clear streams. No, Vipassana is about working on your attachment. Attachment to both the things you like and the things you don’t like, recognising the impermanence of everything.

There was no escaping your demons here, you had to acknowledge them, face them, look them squarely in the eyes and let them pass away not through a fight with them, but by observing them, with equanimity (non-attachment). Things came into being for a while, you either like or dislike them and then, sooner or later, they passed away. But they were always changing and we were always forming attachments that made us miserable, at least if we didn’t accept that change.

$1,000,000 comes your way, maybe you’re super happy and spend it on stuff. Perhaps you invest a bunch so the interest it earns means the principal $1 million hangs on for centuries. But then you get attached to your million dollar lifestyle. And maybe you want $2 million, maybe you need to buy a BMW and the colour you want is out of stock and you crack the shits, or the leather interior wasn’t what you were imagining, or it’s going to take 3 months to deliver rather than 3 days.

Maybe you hire a butler and he overcooks the egg yolks for your eggs Florentine – is that the one where you put Hollandaise sauce over the eggs and have a little smoked salmon with it? – and you’re left with disgusting solid yellow lumps rather than delicious runny gooey golden yolks and you have to throw the hard egg yolks at your butler’s face because you’re not happy.

Anyway you can see how any sort of attachment can make you miserable.

The Buddha discovered the best thing was to simply observe with equanimity. Egg yolks are hard, well there’s people dying in the world so I’ll eat them today. Tomorrow I can have my gooey golden delicious runny yolks that runs around the plates so I can soak it up with some lightly toasted sourdough with olive oil.

Though tomorrow I could also bite into an egg and bacon roll at a cafe (since I don’t have a butler, because I fired the one who couldn’t cook the eggs properly, I mean that’s like a basic thing butlers should be able to do) and the yolks explode and go all over the sleeves of my jacket and over my hand and the waiter hasn’t even brought enough serviettes to deal with the situation. Which is exactly what happened just two weeks ago when I was in a cafe in Braddon in Canberra (in the year 2022 if you’re getting confused with this time travelling).

You get it, misery can be everywhere, even when you get exactly what you want.

How do you escape from suffering? The Buddha had some suggestions for this and a very simple technique of meditation which really helps. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to sell you meditation here. I’m just describing the Vipassana meditation technique and a bit of the philosophy and practice behind it.

First you have to be in the moment. In Vipassana this starts with observing one’s own breath. Inhaling in and out. Not controlling the breath but simply observing it. This is called mindfulness meditation and is a really useful technique in itself.

The 3-day meditation course I initially did back in 1995 in Herefordshire was just 3 days of mindfulness meditation. We didn’t progress to the Vipassana meditation part.

I sat for three days, observed my breath from around 4.30 am to 9 pm with breaks for breakfast, lunch and a light beverage and fruit for dinner, as well as some time to get up and stretch our legs. We sat for 3 days and then we finished. I said hi to a few people who had done the course, I got a few contact details in case I might hit them up for a place to stay, then I spent a few days volunteering at the centre helping in the garden and in the kitchen, waiting for the full 10-day Vipassana course to commence.

One of the meditation teachers offered to buy me a lolly in the nearby village in between the courses. In Australia offers of lollies are usually associated with paedophiles, but in the UK it apparently means an icy-pole, a zooper dooper type thing, an ice block. I hesitantly agreed, trusting that I’d meditated at least enough to avoid the karma of another poking up the arse (figuratively or literally) by a dodgy stranger. Whilst in the village I saw fruit trees for sale and I bought the centre a plum tree which I planted in their fruit orchard. I figured I didn’t have much money to donate but a fruit tree would keep giving for years to come. Perhaps someone’s eating one of its fruits right now, or whenever the plums ripen there.

They turned the heating off in some of the areas between courses so I almost froze to death trying to have a shower in the main block, but apart from that it was pretty pleasant. A bit of meditation, then a bit of work, then a bit more meditating. I got to chat with some of the fellow servers at lunch and around the place, and plant a few flowers and do some weeding. There were a few of us in our 20s there. A Polish woman, and one from France, and one from Germany, and a geeky bloke from England. There was a rather stern older lady from Austria or somewhere who made sure all us young folks were focussed on meditating and not other shenanigans – the centres, including the main meditation halls, are always divided between men and women’s sections to help with this as well, though the kitchen was a neutral area and we could chat with the opposite sex there. It was all very nice.

The 10-day course started about 3 days after the 3-day course. I think they’ve since dropped having those 3-day mindfulness courses as the Vipassana technique is the main focus and they suggest that takes at least 10-days to (begin to) master. Possibly people didn’t really come back for the 10-day courses after the 3-day course either and it was getting too confusing.

As part of the course you pledge to uphold a few simple rules, known as the 5 Precepts. The first are fairly straightforward to keep: to not steal, not lie or speak falsehoods (well, mostly the course is done in silence, so apart from the day at the end when we start chatting again, that’s achievable), not to kill, and to abstain from intoxicating substances (no drugs or alcohol). The last one is to abstain from sexual misconduct, which for the duration of the course means a vow of complete abstinence. I have never had sex with another person during a course, or even while helping out at a centre, that would be breaking the rules, but occasionally I get a bit desperate and need to masturbate. I’m not alone, I’m sure. During my first Vipassana course, that I’d done a year before, I was chatting to Evan and his girlfriend who I forget the name of. I think Evan resisted having a wank but his girlfriend was like, well you know at some stage I just put my hand down the front of my pants for a bit of a wank.

It’s something I could work on, but I can’t promise it’ll ever stop completely. I find 10 days a super effort to not ejaculate, if I’m not in a coma or something, and feel it may cause some medical issues if I hold it in too long.

I started the mindfulness meditation again for the first 3 and a half days. That’s 3 1/2 days from 4.30 am to 9 pm, some shorter sessions, some longer, just breaking for breakfast, lunch, a bit of lemon tea in the evening and a short talk from the Vipassana master Goenka, which was delivered via video. It’s probably digital now.

On day four the technique changes – rather dramatically led by Vipassana master Goenka, via video – from observation of the breath to the full-blown Vipassana technique, observing sensations through the whole body from head to toe, toe to head, up and down, down and up with equanimity (non-attachment).

Again, we do this technique from 4.30 to 9 pm, same sort of schedule.

Much easier said than done. A small itch becomes unbearable. Some heat in your ear searing. Your attention wanes, wanders, you go back to your breath to get some focus, then go back to observing the sensations over your body (these are physical sensations of your body by the way, nothing imaginary) and then I start thinking about that plum tree and when will it fruit, I should really have packed some more comfortable meditation clothes, and have I been doing this for an hour or 5 minutes, and when’s lunch? A lot of less mundane and more emotional stuff also comes up as well. For me it can be violent confrontations with my now deceased alcoholic father, or longing for a past lover in Switzerland. We have all this baggage from our years on Earth that we’re constantly replaying in our minds, not letting go of. Often making us miserable.

As I’d previously done a Vipassana course, and considered an ‘old student’ they gave me access to special solitary meditation booths. They were big enough to sit down comfortably but not to stretch your legs out too much. They were quiet, and despite the difficulties in remaining focussed and not letting my mind stray too far away, I was sometimes able to meditate for hours (or at least a full hour) on end.

At other times all the students meditated together in the dhamma hall. Men on one side and women on the other with the meditation teacher and those serving on the course at the front of the room. Those serving on the course meditate to the side up at the front.

Some of the non-spiritual highlights of the 10 days was that I saw a pheasant one day, a hare, some snowflakes, and a lot of birds in hedges as I walked around outside during the breaks. Occasionally a hawk would flutter in the sky looking down on some unsuspecting prey.

I ate my meals outside everyday, on a log overlooking the frosty fields in the morning and the wet and lush fields later in the day. Even though the course was 10 days of silence, I still didn’t want to hang around people eating in the hall during the meal breaks. I was often the only person out there looking at the lush green fields and hedges as I ate my porridge in the morning or my vegetarian curry stew for lunch, with a different pulse in it everyday. The food was pretty good actually.

It was day 10 of the course, we were released from our vows of silence around 10.30 and started to make the chatty readjustment to the real world.

It was over a fortnight now since I’d left London. I was ready to go back there, collect my passport and then head to Ireland to see if I could make a go of things.

The day went quickly, we still meditated a few times a day and there was also another evening talk by the guru Goenka. Most people enjoyed his evening video chats, and as the name Vipassana also means insight, so were Goenka’s discourses, just as insightful.

Goenka passed away in 2013.

Sometimes I think Vipassana meditation sounds super passive. But it’s not passive at all. Even though there’s really only 5 rules to commit to, and I regularly stray on the intoxicating substance one, these 5 rules can help you change the world.

If we all vowed to at least not kill other humans, even if we kill animals for meat and the like, we could avoid the misery and suffering of war and not have to spend billions on weapons to deter others. If we vow to avoid lying we could have open and transparent government and avoid having narcissistic psychos like Trump and Putin in power – though those pricks probably won’t follow the rules and abuse our good intentions, which you’re probably right about to a large extent. If we had vowed not to steal centuries ago we could have done away with colonisation, slavery and taking other people’s lands – and there’s still time to try and give compensation for the misdeeds of the past.

These simple things can allow us to live active and effective lives. I know many will want to argue about when it could be right to kill, or to take intoxicating substances, or even to lie. I know the world’s not perfect, but if you’re focussing on all the times these simple things won’t work, or aren’t practical, you’re not even trying and you might as well sit around like a potato rather than spreading love and joy in the world. Sure, we can have defence forces, but we should make every effort to address the reasons for war and to rid the world of the worst of weapons, especially nuclear weapons! We can also make laws, or individual purchasing choices to stop the privileged of the world exploiting the less privileged by making them work for 10 cents a day to make our clothes, or by hogging all of the COVID vaccines for westerners.

But all that aside. Back then in 1995, after 10-days and more meditating, I was ready to go and take control of my life again. To take action, and make plans, but also to protect myself from the ups and downs of life when things didn’t go my way.

It is like one of the slogans my dad had from alcoholic anonymous:

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

By the end of the 10 days I’d done enough to not be too fussed about sapphires, or plans going awry or anything. I just accepted, observed, then went back into the moment.

It was time to go to London to pick up my Irish passport and head over to Ireland.

Time to move on.

On the last morning, I thanked the meditation teacher for the lolly and got a lift to the train station, ready for the next adventure.

50-Year-Old Jovencito con mochilla, la Historia de Juanito’s Travels. Gotta get outta London BlogPt5

Have you ever had lettuce soup? I had it in Dublin. My friend Agatha Julia, from Barcelona, made it. I might get back to that at another time.

1995

I was still in London. April may have started by then. It was certainly getting close to Easter.

I hadn’t slept in a bed for more than 3 hours since Bangkok, three or four nights ago now by my sleep deprived calculations. Last night I’d roughed it like a homeless person on the front lawn of my, well I was about to write friends but in the end they were just some people I knew in Australia who I thought might be home in London and whom I thought might have put me up for the night under a roof. In a bed. Not on the lawn in front of their flat on a freezing cold spring night in London.

Well, screw them. I now at least had $250 and my sister was going to put a further $500 AUD into my account some time today. You could pretty much halve that and get the value in British pounds. So maybe £375 give or take. That wasn’t going to get me far if I was going to stay in the UK.

It certainly wasn’t going to get me as far as Switzerland, where I imagine a hamburger cost $25 or something. It could possibly get me as far as Ireland though. I could find a job there. I had one contact I could try there whole lived on a farm in County Wexford.

I had just been back to the Irish embassy in London and was sitting again in Hyde Park, not far from Buckingham Palace. I’m pretty sure the Queen and Prince Phillip didn’t have to try and work out how to make £375 stretch 12 months, which was the original time I intended to spend in Ireland, or elsewhere in Europe. The whole being ripped off in Bangkok through a sapphire scam had kind of thrown a spanner in the works. Long term planning was off the cards at the moment. It was like I only had 32 cards anyway. Which might be enough for certain versions of euchre I think. Metaphors aside, and the reality of only having £375 meant I could only think of the immediate days ahead.

Before I finished this day though, I wanted a proper fucking bed, and a shower. I made my way to the backpacking area of Earls Court and used some of my £375 to get a room. A little room. But a room all to myself. Not in a dorm, I wasn’t sharing with other smelly hippies tonight.

It cost a bit extra. I was extremely low on cash. But fuck it, I’d spent the last night sleeping on a lawn in from of Newcastle Chick and British Guy’s flat – the same British Guy who’d fucking slept on my cozy floor, with my cozy extra bedding, eating my cozy rolled outs and vegetarian food in Fitzroy, Melbourne.

I’d spent the night before that sleeping on the floor of Heathrow Airport – for all of 3 hours after almost getting deported, and the night before that I managed just 3 hours sleep at a hotel in Bangkok after getting off a plane which engines had blown up, not once, but twice, up in the sky, where I could literally die.

So tonight I was going to have a room to my fucking self. I checked in, chucked my backpack on the ground, got out some fresh clothes, went and had a quick shower, pulling bits of grass and twigs from my hair due to my previous night of homelessness. I hadn’t had the opportunity for a shower for the last 3 days. What a simple indulgent pleasure to feel warm water running down your naked body. I hung my towel to dry outside the Earls Court window. I got out one of my Thai cigarettes and puffed out the window while I contemplated my next move. And reviewing what had gone wrong so far.

It’s all started to go pear shaped when I bought those fucking sapphires in Bangkok, so number 1 things was to get rid of them. They were bad luck. If I couldn’t sell them I’d just give them away. I was starting afresh so the sapphires had to go. Number 2, I had to get to Ireland, Ireland was the only place I couldn’t possibly survive for more than a few days at the moment. But my Irish passport was still in transit from Australia to the London Embassy so I needed to wait a few more days to collect it.

I couldn’t stay in this backpackers in Earls Court, especially in my fancy single room, that I thoroughly deserved after my ordeal, waiting for my passport though, especially in a private room, so I had to find somewhere that wasn’t going to cost me anything. I ruled out further attempts to contact Newcastle Chick and British Guy. I ran through my other options. Then it popped into my head. A Vipassana Meditation centre! Vipassana centres were run on donations. While I really liked to pay I could always do that later when I had more money.

I could try and go to the Vipassana Meditation centre and wait in the UK until my Irish passport arrived. After that I had Irish woman’s address. Her name was Nora. I’d never met her but she did used to live down the road from Christophe’s mum’s place in Tugun and that was a close enough link at this stage. I’m not sure why I had the meditation centre’s address, I think I’d planned to do a course somewhere along the way, perhaps in India. But, they also had a centre in the UK, in Herefordshire.

So I finished my fag, grabbed my sapphires and went out the door to find a pay phone. On the way I saw a church. I’m catholic – well more a catholic buddhist are thinking hippy – and I suspect this one was one of those protestant types where Anglicans go. It didn’t matter anyway, a protestant in hand is worth two Catholic Buddhists in the bush. I found whatever protestants called priests and I handed him a bunch of sapphires and I said: ‘Look these sapphires are real, they are just not worth that much, maybe you could sell them and give it to poor people or something.’ Or words to that effect. The protestant priest guy looked at the gems, looked at me with the stunned look of someone who’s just been handed 5 sapphires, and before he could say much more than a muttered ‘thanks’ I’d made my way out of the church and into a pay phone booth.

I called the UK Vipassana Centre’s number.

‘Hello’, I said, ‘I would like to do a course, I really need to do a course as soon as possible’. It was a meditation emergency!

‘Well, we have a 3-day course starting the day after tomorrow, but we usually only use that as an introductory course. Old students like yourself, who have done a course before would be better off doing a full 10 day course. We have a 10-day course starting in a week’.

‘Can I do the 3-day course and then the next 10-day course and volunteer in between time?’ The more meditation I did the better I thought, plus I’d never volunteered at a centre and that was kind of like paying them while I couldn’t afford to donate anything else.

They agreed to that and gave me some basic details on how to get there from London and said they’d see me there the day after tomorrow. So at least I had the next few weeks sorted out. I went back to the backpackers. As I entered the building one of the backpackers staff asked me whether I was the one who’d hung his towel out the window. I said yes. They said I couldn’t do that anymore. I said fine, whatever. I went up to my room, took my towel in and just sat on the bed and read a book for a while before going out and finding some cheap vegetarian food to eat, which I can’t recall at all and then going to sleep. It was one of the top ten sleeps I’d ever had in my life. A new level of deepness.

The next day I rose and had breakfast. There was an abundance of toast, tea, coffee, and bits of fruit. It was like paradise. My journey had kind of begun, a born again journey to replace the one I’d started a week or so ago which I now wanted to relegate to history. I guess Nietzsche said whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I preferred Buddha to Nietzsche nowadays, he’d said the source of all our misery is attachment. It was time to detach. It reminds me of a quote from cartoonist Michael Leunig : Let it go. Let it out. Let it all unravel. Let it free and it can be a path on which to travel. Leunig had been there at my first Vipassana meditation course about a year earlier.

I felt stronger after my fill of toast, Jam, margarine, more toast, tea, a few cups of tea, fruit and the such. I went into London again and did some touristy things, walking a bit along the Thames, looking at a few pigeons on statues and things, then it was back to my very own room again and more delightful sleep, in a bed and not in the garden outside of some supposed ‘friends’ flat who were now ghosting me.

The very own room bit really invigorated me. I should have been budgeting more and going for a dorm room but the spiritual lift it gave me was worth every extra penny or pounds. And I was still hardly spending much on anything else as you could find a bit of vegetarian pizza pretty cheap.

The next day I made my way to Herefordshire to begin meditating again. I took the train, it felt like going off to Hogwarts before I knew what Hogwarts was. We passed Oxford and I got to chatting a little with a professor who asked whether I was a student. No, just an Aussie on the way to a Buddhist retreat in Herefordshire.

The little pockets of forest along the way looked like the type Robin Hood might frequent. I went to school with someone who claimed to be related to Robin Hood. They might have been told the story by some Thai gem dealer as it turns out that even if Robin Hood existed (which he didn’t) he wasn’t exactly the sort of person one could relate their lineage to. I’m related to the Surtees family, they have some claim to the Tees river up in Durham. Here I was, just a few days in the United Kingdom and I was already being sucked in by their class wars, trying to prove I had some connection to a river I’d never been to to make myself think I’m all posh and fancy. I say the French Revolution didn’t go far enough and should have jumped the channel. But not to be. We do have the Queen’s bodiless head on our Australian coins though. And to be honest, if someone offered me a free castle on the Tees River at this stage it would be hard to refuse it.

I got off somewhere and got off and took a bus to a place which seemed to have a lot of constants in its name, which was surrounded by juicy pink pigs in muddy paddocks, where I was picked up in the vipassana minibus by one of the meditation centre’s volunteers.

The meditation phase of my journey had begun. The rest could wait. I needed to be in the moment now. To realise the impermanence of things. Both good things and bad things.