Edging towards the albino coast, breaker of storms and smugglers, hunting ground for traffickers of shells and slaves, I surfed the drifting memories that most British children harbour – Whitsun half-terms, a new swimsuit, sandcastles and burial pits ploughed into a grainy, grey shore.

But on this breathtaking clear blue day, I flew straight over Beachy Head, its barber-shop lighthouse standing sentinel against matchbox boats and ghosts, and its clarity excised a gasp from my throat.

He flew away too, on a day full of blues, excusing himself with a step over the pure chalk cliff.

He loved Shakespeare, those rich characters formed from foreign heat and light. Prospero, Proteus, pounds of flesh. When we knew him, before he bowed out, he was a shameless, silver-tongued Mercutio. He loved words. He delivered them in a voice that could make the angels weep. His actions spoke louder.

In dreams, I fall. I fly and fall. You’re supposed to wake up before impact but sometimes I don’t and I feel my own life crash out of me. They say it’s the most humane way to die after gunshot, the scattering of life’s coil between the rocks and thundering waves. Except for those whose dreams may come. We are such stuff.

I had weeks of nightmares after I heard. I stood at the edge of the sea and looked down the vertiginous white precipice, letting my eyes fall to the far beneath, fearful for the one step forward, faltering or flagrant, from which there is no return. Every night, I awoke with a cry. Not for the act or the will behind it. That was his to own. But for some unspoken latency, the part of me that could follow suit.

They’ll suppose his mind was disturbed. Perhaps not. Daniel Stern said that suicides were God’s graduate students.

How beautiful the coast as I fly away. Far away.

Falling by Delia Derbyshire

My life wears its necklace of crystallised moments and while memories are mostly a set of restrung chimera, the special ones contain a perfect bead of light captured on canvass. My personal art collection includes moonlight in Karnak, sunlight in Petra, making love to someone I truly loved, and the Japan gig at Hammersmith Odeon 1981.

David Sylvian may have been Japan’s frontman, but it was Mick Karn who caught attention with his sharp suit, robotic headnod and balletic bourrées across the stage. The man was the epitome of style and grace, with bass playing that could dig right down to your soul, pluck out your heart and dance pointe on it. His hands were those of a craftsman and it’s no surprise that he was also a talented sculptor, carving those same strong, dextrous fingers, the type that can as easily produce eroticism out of an inert piece of kit as deftly unhook a bra. I treasure my signed brochure of his exhibition at the Hamilton Gallery.

There had been many gigs before, there have been many since, but that night, I think, encapsulated the hopeful cusp of my adult life. I was about to start drama school, finally taking my long overdue leave of home and stretching out into an unknown future. My best friend was at fashion college. Together we primped and prepared ourselves to head for the clubs or student parties with the latter-day punks and burgeoning Romantics. We adorned ourselves carefully for every encounter with the outside world, rummaging through the markets and antique stalls in Kensington, Camden, Lawrence Corner, or my mother’s hoarded clothes from the fifties and sixties, nipped, tucked, adapted. We looked beautiful. We would take the world by storm.

As I’m currently residing in a (freezing) rural community with a bicycle as my only form of transport, old jeans and sweaters are now the order of the day. I don’t mind so much but there’s a part of me grieving for the time when I cared more, when I had the time and resources to indulge in the fun of decoration and reinvention

But it meant more to us than externals. Talking to the same friend the other day, we were analysing the bands that have really made an impact on us over the years and suddenly we made the connection. Our favourite artists either emerged from the Art Schools or developed powerful visuals in parallel to their music: Bowie, Japan, Foxx, Scritti Politti, Fad Gadget, XTC, Ian Dury, Kate Bush, Bill Nelson, Sparks, David Byrne, Roxy Music, Velvet Underground, Laurie Anderson, the list goes on. They were cunning (in the positive sense of the word), not prostitutes for the baubles of fame. They dared to mix into the palette of good musicianship literature, philosophy, dance, drama, fashion and multimedia, to produce an original blend of rhythms, mood, experimentation, soundscapes and lyrics which bludgeoned you from behind.

I’d completely forgotten that I used to spend long hours in my teens designing clothes and cities. I have a mild form of Synesthesia – say a word, I see a colour, play music, I see choreography – yet I haven’t really done any art since then and I’m not sure why that visual compulsion got switched off. Shortly before Mick Karn’s death, a friend sent me a sketchbook and pencils – so perhaps it’s time to reclaim my art and my style, because I don’t believe our dreams should die with our heroes.

If life didn’t turn out quite as originally envisaged, it’s still had plenty of sparkle underscored by the never-ending soundtrack of amazing artists. Thank you for providing some of the magic, Mick. That’s something that can never die.

Mick Karn: 24 July 1958 to 4 January 2011

Please donate to Cancer Research here.

I debated selling it, convinced (like many others) that I needed the extra pocket money, and having explored online stores, dress agencies and car boot sales with little success, I stopped, took a deep breath and made a major reassessment of my priorities and values. Almost immediately, I discovered ASAP Africa, an Aids Support organisation in Zambia. Earlier this year, they instigated a scheme whereby donated wedding dresses are taken to Lusaka as part of a start-up hire business for sex workers, thereby offering skills and financial support for vulnerable women as well as giving poorer brides the chance to fulfil their dream of a big white wedding.

More details about this wonderful scheme are here.

So I’ll be taking my dress over to Windsor some time next week. We take so much for granted in this country, often confusing need with want as we cram our homes full of the latest electronics and high street clothes, yet even on a low income, I have still been able to do and have so much. This is a small gesture of gratitude for how privileged I am and I hope that the woman who eventually wears my dress is blessed with health and happiness, peace and plenty in her life ahead.

Please spread the word.

I realised I hadn’t watched a game since the 2002 World Cup, when I worked in an enlightened office environment where the powers-that-be had fitted live TV screens to every computer rather than see their entire workforce bunk off. I’ve been out of the loop since then. In fact, I only realised that England were out of the tournament when I clicked onto a news site at work a day after the event. “Oh”, I exclaimed. “Are England out?” The rest of the office looked at me as though I were a paedophile.

Consequently, I rather fancied watching the World Cup Final this year. Besides, I have a lot of Dutch friends, or friends living in Flatland, so felt obliged to lend psychic support. The trouble is, I don’t have a TV. I asked around, and friends who do have a TV refused to entertain the thought of broadcasting football on it. So I popped down to the City Arts Project, thinking that a bit of creative camaraderie in Shoreditch would make for a fun and civilised evening.

To be honest, friends aside, I was totally non-partisan. I just wanted to watch the game, happy to cheer the good moves and boo the fouls, howsoever executed. Just to be safe, though, I wore green to throw the buggers off the scent, knowing that I could secretly pick sides based on the usual female criteria of legs and sex appeal.

Dutch fans had nabbed the front-row seats (thank God they didn’t stand) and created an altar on the TV unit out of a carefully draped national flag, orange balloons and strategically placed bottles of overpriced beer.

I stood further back among the predominantly Spanish spectators and realised very quickly that I had oh so picked the wrong place. On my right, in the Red corner, was Little Miss Overbite and on my left, the Orange Intense Mr Overheight. I ended up being the unwitting sausage in a hate sandwich.

We watched a lacklustre first half, the Spanish a bunch of terriers running rings round a pack of greyhounds. Sometimes the players even kicked the ball instead of each other. Nearly every single member of the Dutch team ended up with a yellow card and there were some terrific amateur dramatics from the Spanish. It was at this point that both Intense Mr Overheight and Little Miss Overbite started spewing forth their own brand of vitriolic soliloquy. Mr Orange kept eyeing Miss Red and gesticulating, and she retaliated by having a go at the ref.

“I fucking hate the English. I really fucking hate them. I’ll burn their fucking flag. Ce-ce-ce, ce-ce-ce, shayen cossock hillock tassock bollock ce-ce-ce-ce-ce.” She degenerated into the newsreader from Chanel 9, sounding exactly like 1:43 here.

I felt rather sorry for the ref. It’s a thankless task, to be officially hated for not having 360º vision or for suspending disbelief during Oscar-winning injury acting. I suddenly recalled one of my drama school buddies who used to be a referee. He even wrote about the experience. I wonder what he’s doing these days?

Mr Orange had now initiated his own ramblings, which amounted to a convoluted version of “it’s not fair”, the dark, furry voice on my left fighting the piercing soprano on my right. More fury from the Red corner, now focused on the Dutch team, or the entire human race, I couldn’t work out which.  “Ce-ce-ce hate ce-ce-ce fuck, hate ce-ce-ce … they should fucking die. They should be killed, murdered, ce-ce-ce, hate fuck ce-ce-ce-ce-ce.” The corners started folding over into an envelope. Fingers skimmed my eyelashes as arms waved at each other, pointing, shouting. Mr Orange suddenly charged over for a facedown, blocking my view.

“Oi”, says I, “I’m trying to watch this. Just calm down and please get out of my way.”

Various other permutations of polite endeavour failed to instil any sense into these overwrought, over-tall or overbitten tossers. They didn’t even glance at me. I think wearing green rendered me invisible. I finally succumbed to the pathetic cliché, “look, there’s no reason to get angry. It’s only a game.”

Tumbleweed.

There are moments when football is beautiful; a supreme stretch of line and form, a shape in the air, the connected curve of a pass. Some years ago the English National Ballet produced a piece based on such moves – they saw the correlation with dance. I love the ballet, but wouldn’t dream of having a screaming match with someone who dissed Alina Cojocaru.

I could feel my own xenophobia rapidly rising to the surface as I considered what each side would do if it either won or lost. The Dutch would buy cheese and sex and the Spanish would kill an animal with something long and sharp. In fact, since I was beginning to feel like punching someone, I did the sensible thing at half time and moved.

In the second half, someone blew a vuvuzela – twice – after which there ominous silence from that spot in the room. I think, and hope, it got shoved up the perpetrator’s arse.

During extra time, I had decided to leave if it came to penalties. I don’t like them and I don’t find them exciting. A game running to penalties is akin to long, painful foreplay with no orgasm. Penalties are the equivalent of “oh never mind, I’ll just do it myself”. Luckily the Spanish finished me off and I’m grateful just for the sake of Little Miss Overbite’s hapless boyfriend who was most likely saved from the curse of perforated eardrums.

I got out of there as quickly as I could. The best side won but maybe I’ve been away from it for too long, I just felt deflated. The vicious behaviour both on and off the pitch really got me down and I suspect that’s the last match I’ll be watching for quite a while.  It may be a beautiful game, but it sure has some ugly participants.

You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
Frank Zappa

(c) Heather Tracy

Midsummer is serious business in Lithuania, and we decided to celebrate at the archeologically rich Kernavė, site of seven hills rising above the winding, sacred river Neris, each hill with its own bonfire to blaze a vigil through the night.  We crammed into the Hippy Express, so named when we realised that one of our party was the only short-haired individual on the bus, and headed out of Vilnius just as the heavens opened and discharged a month’s rainfall in fifteen minutes. As we trundled through the traffic lights now rising periscopically from a lake, we watched pedestrians take off their shoes and wade from one side of the road to the other while water seeped through the bus doors to threaten our driver. It did not bode well. As suddenly as it had started, the tempest stopped, the sun emerged and, giving confused thanks for the entertaining elemental fanfare, we were on our way.

Kernavė had a touch of the micro Glastonbury about it – food stalls, barbecues, crafts and a stage, but with virtually no English of the people or language variety. Menus were incomprehensible, so food came in the form of point and buy.  The only universal word was Beer. I have found that this word works well in most European countries, and as beer is highly nutritious, there is little chance of ever starving to death on my home continent. I discovered Lithuanian Svyturys and we’ve been having a love affair ever since.

The first job of any self-respecting celebrant was to prepare one’s floral crown. We sat in the fields gently weaving flowers into circlets, trying to incorporate the traditional 23 (I think) different varieties. The last sunlight glinted onto an Elysian scene as golden-toned family groups crouched in the meadows fashioning garlands out of bundles of beautiful blooms.

Duly adorned, we joined a procession of traditional costumes through the leafy gateway and up the main hill to where the first fire-lighting ritual would take place.  After chants, dances, songs of call and competition, a circle was formed and the women took my hands and dragged me into the centre for a game which required me to walk seven paces and throw my crown backwards into a tree. However many times it took for my crown to hook onto a branch represented how many years it would take for me to get married. I’ve no idea what my face looked like once full comprehension of the rules dawned, but I suspect it was horror. I tried to resist. “No, no, I’m not doing that again,” but they insisted. Oh well, I though, it’s only a game. My wreath landed in the tree on my third attempt. I felt surprisingly elated. I must have been drunk.

(c) Heather Tracy

Later I sat with a lovely friend by the Neris. We meditated into the water while the fires trembled on the hills behind us. As the last light winked out, people began the slippery descent to the river bank and threw in their flowers, the theory being that one’s wreath becomes entangled with another and said person (preferably the handsome boy from the next village) will be magically drawn to your charms.  We followed suit.  Later, a formal procession, flanked by flaming torches, carried little wooden cradles embedded with candles upon which crowns were laid and floated downstream, hundreds of little lights bobbing under the stars.

I’m still expecting to wander bleary-eyed to the door one morning and find a long-haired lover from Lithuania on the doorstep, although it’s more likely that my free-flowing wreath made its way out to the Baltic Sea and drifted slowly towards the Thames Estuary, picking up effluence as it passed Southend. Whenever I walk across Waterloo Bridge, I always rather expect to catch sight of it bouncing up the Thames before getting stuck on a sandbank outside the National Theatre.

I once offered up to Venus a comprehensive list of desirable attributes in a mate. Since she’s a lazy tart who takes absolutely no notice of my overtures of friendship, I have now struck off most items and decided to settle for someone who is not an invertebrate. My needs are simple.  I want a silver ring, a floral crown and a puppy. And a honeymoon in Lithuania.

(c) Heather Tracy

Every celebration contains a shadow, every shadow an ecstasy, and I always shed tears at Summer Solstice. Vita Sackville-West wrote about the “small despair” of the year’s summit, when the sun glowers in its waning glory and we measure the meagre rationing of light that highlights another year devoid of sufficient freckles, unfettered feet or fucking. It marks the passage of so little done and so much to do.

The Wheel of the Year turns with Love, and we who know of its perversities and paradoxes know too that it is as fierce and painful as a babe’s precocious tooth upon a mother’s breast.

Phoebus reveals the wrinkle, the blemish and the sparkling eye. Stagnancy is an illusion. Gnōthi seauton. How immense the arc of change. I have achieved far more than I realised.

So the hotel was a welcome retreat after the trials of modern travel. After oohing and ahhing over the king-size bed, crisp linen, minibar and corner bath, I headed straight to Four Mile Beach only one hundred paces from my room, to stand with arms outstretched in devotion to the luxury of heat and light. I’m not used to this style of living. I’m a back-pack and cheap guesthouse girl, so my world had been turned upside down in so many ways already.

Four Mile Beach

The walk into town took a leisurely half hour along the beach, including time to splash toes en route. The serene Coral Sea is reluctant to relinquish her riches, making the sand so pure that beachcombing became a serious treasure hunt for pebbles, amethyst-coloured shells and sections of coral washed in from the reef.  Port Douglas is a hippy dream and I felt at home immediately. It’s amazing how a few degrees of latitude change clothing lassitude. Supermarket dictums hold no sway here. No one wears shoes, excepting flip-flops. No one wears very much, actually, and to spend an entire day walking around streets, shops and restaurants completely barefoot was my own definition of personal luxury. The laid-back, easy, conversational style of the locals was conducive to immediate benevolence, and in June, straight after the Winter Solstice, the weather was hot without being stifling.

I explored the range of entertainment on offer. Apart from the pub advertising nightly Cane Toad racing, the main street was mostly lined with good-looking restaurants, shops devoted to beachwear or semi-precious jewellery, and a range of really cool cafes including Re:Hab, noted for its good flat whites.  It also displayed a large list of very sensible house rules including: “Anyone requesting country, progressive jazz or gospel will be asked to leave.”

A radiation of ochre enticed me into the Bundarra Gallery, home to a beautiful collection of Aboriginal art. I was immediately drawn to The Witchdoctor’s Wife by Linda Syddick Tjungkiya Wukula, which depicts the artist’s experience of seeing windmills for the first time. Discussing the work with the gallery manager, I was told that these paintings are probably the last of their kind as this unique, older generation dies out. Old age, illness and a Western lifestyle are taking their toll on a people who were healthier in the bush, eating food appropriate to their bodies’ evolution. That other Western ill, colonial conceit, has also caught up with their craft. Apparently there are now troupes of art undergraduates arrogantly trying to teach Aboriginal artists how to paint ‘properly’. I’m staggered at the temerity of a bunch of trainees giving painting lessons to anybody, let alone someone whose birth certificate is the land itself.

At the other end of the main street stood the local, multi-denominational chapel, St Mary’s By The Sea, a pretty, white wooden building with probably one of the most beautiful altar frescoes in the world. Shutters open to reveal a clear blue bay bordered by an overhanging tree, except that this particular form of art is nature’s own. It would be worth tying the knot in church for such a backdrop. We’d met a guy on the plane who was getting married there and we congregated to give him surprise congratulations as he took his crimson-clad lady by the arm and walked down the aisle to electric guitars blasting out ‘Here Comes the Bride’.

The same area was transformed at the weekend when the Sunday Market rolled into town, and I met Uncle Friday from Thursday Island (allegedly) who wove palm leaf animals and bowls. Here also were stalls selling home-spun and dyed textiles, seed jewellery and sea motifs, fresh coconut juice, glass bowls recycled from old windows, tie dye, silver ash and maple, Australian coffee and chocolates blended with chilli or lemon myrtle. Gangs of motorbikes gathered, YaYa’s (a derogatory term for Germans in campervans) headed off to the hills, and we sat under cool canopies consuming Johnny Cakes for breakfast and ice cold beer for lunch.

On The Inlet

One afternoon, I was told that I was going to meet George the Groper, which sounds rather like a scenario from a 70s sitcom.  George was, in fact, a fish. A very large fish with a very large, puckering mouth. Stories abound of gropers engulfing the heads of hapless divers only to spit them out again in disgust. We gathered at local eatery, On The Inlet, to enjoy happy hour while they pumped out James Brown and Steppenwolf at full volume. Then at 5pm everyone huddled by the railings, drinks in hand, and peered into the water. A carcass was dangled over the side and the THX cinema riff roared through the speakers followed by the theme to Jaws.

We waited. John Williams played to our expectations. We sipped our drinks and heart rates increased.

The handler wiggled the carcass.

Still nothing.

Then, out of nowhere, a huge dark shadow swept into the shallows, opened its enormous Mick Jagger lips, grabbed a chunk of meat and disappeared into the depths. That was it. George’s party trick. While we tucked into our own carcasses half an hour later, I spotted George sneaking back to finish off his meal away from public gaze. George was no fool.

I settled back to relish the sunset, watching the little black spider crabs on the rocks, the Chinese junks and steam boats heading back to harbour, fringed by a haze of smoke from the distant sugar cane fields as the stubble was put to flame. There’s fierce argument over the cane-burning season, which produces a huge amount of greenhouse gases and associated air pollution. One pilot scheme in New South Wales has been set up whereby cane residue will be burnt at new power plants to generate renewable energy, but it is only one project for a huge industry whose intensity has led to an alarming level of soil degradation. Land is simply not allowed to lie fallow for long. It is pumped with fertilisers, which don’t actually fertilise the soil but are washed away into the inlets and rivers, with devastating effects on local habitats. Eating the delicious, local fish such as mackerel, yellow fin tuna or barramundi, it crossed my mind that I was ingesting more than I bargained for.

That night, struggling with jetlag, I finally got to sleep in the early hours of the morning only to be woken by the most blood-curdling scream I have ever heard. It sounded like the massacre of a basketful of puppies. Upon polite enquiry at reception (“Excuse me, was someone murdered last night?”) I was told that the noise was courtesy of the Bush Stone-Curlew, also appropriately known as the ‘screaming woman’ bird, although Aborigines believe that they house the spirits of the dead, which strikes me as a far more logical explanation.

Bleary-eyed, I gulped down coffee and climbed into the car for my introduction to Daintree rainforest, a World Heritage Site and older than the Amazon by 50 million years. Apart from its tremendous biodiversity, Daintree is also a repository for those who want to disappear, the ones who have outstayed the visa or parole. You just leave your mobile and computer behind and walk into the shadows. Apparently there are whole communities in there spending their days living off a rudimentary form of hydroelectric power and growing their own smiley stuff. After I had been told this, my friend looked at me very seriously. “You’re not thinking of making a run for it?” I didn’t realise that the fugitive mentality twitching in my limbs was so obvious. I laughed nervously at her perception. No. Not here. Not yet. But it was a close call.

Daintree Icecream Company

We started at the Daintree Icecream Company, where all the plants and fruits are grown and reaped on site, assuring fresh, seasonal ingredients. Our icecream that day consisted of a base of Soursop, with Black Sapote, Wattle Seed and Mango. Then up to the forest itself, leaving the car and walking through the dense brush in search of a blue water hole, my friend’s fiancé, Mark, offering up a botany lesson en route as we encountered Sensitive Mimosa – which actually recoils from touch, Wait-a-While – vines with nasty little burrs that tug you as you pass – and Blue Quondong, medicinal fruit and staple bushtucker.

After clambering over roots and down a steep path, we found the water hole, which was indeed turquoise blue. A tricky, painful wobble over stones and pebbles, including chunks of ochre, and we were in, splashing with delight through the clear, fresh water. We felt smug and proprietorial about our water hole. We were primal beings, the first and last humans to ever exist. We were explorers, adventurers, brave and bold and we would serve up stories of derring do for our astonished friends. Mark was exploring the perimeter. “Look”, he yelled and pointed. A solitary toothbrush dangled from a bush. We were not the first visitors. Nor would we be the last, for someone else was shouting at us. A young couple stood on the hillock above looking both disappointed and perturbed. “Is there anything in there that will eat us?” We laughed and made our way towards our towels.

Our next stop was Mossman Gorge, a fast flowing section of river and one of the most photographed spots in the region. By this time, I needed a pee. Adjacent to the parking area was a hut-like set of simple, unlit toilets. I charged into the last cubicle, slammed the door and prepared to pull down my shorts. Just then I spotted the shadowy outline of something very large and leggy clinging to the door. Oh shit, there was no easy escape. I decided to keep as calm as possible. Doing up my shorts, I slithered along the cubicle wall, tentatively fumbled for the door handle, gently pulled and insinuated myself through about four inches of crack before breathing again. “Stay calm, stay calm”, I kept telling myself. My bladder was bursting. I’d have to make a second attempt. I went to the opposite end of the hut, pushed open the door and had a good look around the cubicle before exposing my nether regions to any more wildlife.

As soon as I left the loos, my heart went into overdrive and it took me fifteen minutes to calm down. Yes, I’m an arachnophobe. Big time. I used to refuse to stay in any room inhabited by an eight-legged lurker until I knew that it had been removed. I’m convinced that I only entered into serious relationships so that I had a man in the house to dispose of the buggers. Once single, I succumbed to ploughing through Kaleidoscope and other worthy publications in search of a technical marvel that would discard both the necessity of running to neighbours to dispose of the big hairy monsters and the uneasy feeling that my life hitherto had been devoid of the necessities of sauna pants and a set of four spring-mounted meerkats.

I found my grail, a battery-operated suction tube that works on the principle of a wine glass and postcard, but with more distance. I affectionately call it my Sucky Sucky (just as I call the fan heater the Blow Job). I’m single, remember.  It pretty well does the trick, although it’s not infallible and arachnids with long, delicate legs are likely to have them ripped off in the process, which genuinely leaves me mortified. I digress. A short, cold dip in the Gorge (ignoring the danger signs) did the trick. Fighting a strong current is far less scary than fighting eight legs.

(c) Reef Magic

Keeping with the overarching water theme that permeates this trip, I cannot omit the highlight when I fulfilled a childhood dream and dived the Great Barrier Reef, the only organic structure visible from space. Mark, whom I’m now convinced is an angel in disguise, arranged a boat trip from Cairns, one and a half hours across a sea which used to be savannah, to the pontoon at Moore Reef. As a professional SCUBA instructor, he then personally escorted me under the waves and into Wonderland.

It had been ten years since my BSAC Sports Diver qualification lapsed, so I’d misplaced most of the fundamental diving concepts and vocabulary, such as buoyancy and equalisation. Indeed, after such a long break, autogenic responses kicked in despite my love of and comfort with water, and my body started to rebel with a slight form of breathless panic. Regaining control, I slowly descended, stopping only to clear a dodgy ear, and as my body began to remember the drill, I relaxed and sank into a new universe.

Wally the Wrasse (c) Reef Magic

It is perfectly possible to cry through a regulator, and I did. Copiously. The richness and diversity of reef life is something to behold, a vivid urban sprawl with its heaving, ever-moving population of parrot fish, stone fish, sergeant fish, clown (Nemo!) fish. My training had taught me the fundamental rule of “look don’t touch”, but I was encouraged to break taboo to gently stroke a sea cucumber and run my fingers through spaghetti coral. The star turn, though, was Wally the Hump-Headed Maori Wrasse, one of the largest fish in the world. He was actually born female and named Sarah until he changed sex at about nine years of age, and he is now an incorrigible flirt and celebrity in his own right (he has his own Facebook page. This enormous, rubber-lipped blue fish hangs around divers, posing for photos, begging for food and generally stealing the show. It never ceases to amaze me, the surprising relationships between humble animals and humans. In fact, I experienced more intelligent and friendly interaction with this fish than with most of my work colleagues.

After feeding time (for all species), we took a boat out to the reef wall for our second dive. Sunlight streamed in, segueing into tunnels of deepest blue where the wall fell away into the darkness. Here the range of coral became truly psychedelic. If you took a packet of crayons, a large piece of paper and drew a bizarre shape using random colours, I can guarantee it was down there. Mark touched me on the arm to gain attention, his other hand flat, thumb first, against his forehead. I shook my head in bewilderment. He stuck his forefinger up and move it across my eyeline, then pointed. A shark! My first ever shark! It was the generally harmless reef shark, gracefully grazing the side of the wall, the backdrop of indigo highlighting its austere, flowing elegance. I know people who would not so much as paddle in tropical waters for fear of what lies beneath. Their loss. Perhaps I am an obsessive hoarder of beauty, but such greed sometimes requires a degree of risk. I don’t want to reach the end of my life with a range of second hand memories garnered from a TV screen.

Coral near the surface exudes its own sun tan oil, with a protection factor of 300. Inevitably, scientists have tried to exploit this for human use and I’m delighted to report that it doesn’t work. It just slides off the skin. The reef is under enough threat from global warming and pollution without abusing its delicate ecology further simply because human beings cannot be bothered to put on a bloody T-shirt and stay in the shade. Our oceans are the final frontier, an undiscovered country more elusive than outer space. They are the barometer of our planet’s health and they are suffering. If the oceans die, so do we. And while I’m on my soapbox, don’t ever buy coral. Ever. The shops were full of the damn stuff – not from the Reef, but plundered from unprotected zones elsewhere in the world.

In the run up to the wedding, I lazed like a wanton nymph, bathing naked in the sea or lying by the pool sipping cocktails. We built a monster sandcastle on the beach, to the envy of the children who came to watch, and decorated it with tattered rags, shells and seaweed. At night, I stood and gazed at the thick, creamy Milky Way threading through the sky. Scorpius lay low and bright and the Southern Cross, known locally as the Four Sisters, remained the unswerving sentinel of the South. Low on the horizon hovered my ruling planet, Jupiter, so bright that it cast its own beam across the sea. The waxing moon herself was a Cheshire cat, her crescent inverted into a smile or a goblet.  I love stargazing. It makes me feel so small yet so alive, as if every foolish trouble and mistake shrivels into insignificance and all that is left is void, sparkle, expansion and brevity. In that eternal split second, a dropped jaw is as important and ephemeral as the furthest galaxy.

A few days later, after dinner, three of us decided to walk back from Port Douglas along the beach under the now full moon. Being so near the equator, she lay directly overhead and as I slipped and sloshed through the water, I realised that I was walking on the moon itself. Mesmerised I watched each foot rise out of the sea, pale in the dark, and slip back into the water, leaving ripples of sparkling silver. I found myself walking slower and slower, hypnotised, moonstruck, scrying into the ocean, absorbed in the countless tiny particles of light trailing behind my footsteps as the phosphorescent bacteria in the water activated and created my own personal moonbeam. What should have been a twenty-five minute walk took two hours. This land casts its own siren spell. There are so many delightful ways to choose to be lost.

I certainly lost some fundamental cultural references. My religion is entrenched in nerve, blood, bone and landscape and if I have any genetic link to this continent, it is too deep, too far, too tenuous to fathom. In my cold, dark, northern home, the south beats like a drum, a Ballardian compulsion. Now I found myself within the dark heart of the sun itself, my world capsized and the element of fire became a mirage to drive me off the edge of the world and into the raging cold of the Antarctic. The moon was different. I could not identify the plants or constellations and the beguiling façade of the land disguised many poisons. Maybe I was suffering from jet lag, but I felt slightly ill, slightly out of kilter, as though to bring my gods here were a desecration, that to cling to an inappropriate liturgical calendar would break some sacred, alien rhythm. I was a guest. I could only nod my head politely and say, “I will engage but I can’t claim to understand.”

Kuranda

Once the Bride and Groom has tied the knot in an idyllic beachside wedding, the guests began to disperse. I still had a couple of days left, and was invited to stay with Mark’s parents at his skipper’s house in the foothills of the rainforest above Cairns. This gave me a chance to take the old mining rail route into the hills to Kuranda village. I found it to be a contrived, commercial visitor centre, but it was worth dipping down some of the alleys to the less obvious market stalls, where beautiful hand-made jewellery, clothes, woodcarvings and skincare products threatened to beguile away the very few dollars I had left. In the end, I decided that I would try to buy a very cheap opal, as it is the one stone that truly represents Australia. An elderly man was selling Boulder Opals, the Cinderella sister to the iridescent Black Opal that one normally covets, and he began to explain how they are mined in Queensland itself, extracted from thin veins so they can only be cut into freeform, and with an ironstone backing which gives them strength despite sometimes dulling the colour. He gathered strings of them between his fingers. “So much hard work to pluck these from the Earth. So much sweat, labour, pain for so little. Do not choose one. Let it choose you. Take your time.”  I held each one in my hand, and listened to my gut reaction. I kept returning to a small irregular triangle with what looked like a double-sided map contoured in a range of russets like a desert or the bark of a tropical tree. Cutting across this landscape were pale blue rivulets. “This one.” The man looked at me. “Why?” “It’s a map of my life. Look, there’s a maze, a face, rivers, mountains.” “An eye, too.” “Perhaps. This one wants me, so I’d better take it home.” It cost me $20, about £12. The man taught me how to tie it properly and then muttered: “It’s more beautiful than I realised. I think I’ve undercharged you!” Delighted with my bargain, I skipped off back to the main street.

I’d been told to visit the Butterfly museum, but once I’d walked up the hill to the end of the village, I encountered the Australian Venom Zoo. After my spider experience, I figured it would be good therapy to face my phobia and get to know our eight-legged friends a little better. I convinced myself that if I saw lots of spiders, then some more, watched spider videos, looked at spider posters, then had a look at even more spiders, my unconscious would get bored and move on.

The young man who took my money offered to take photos (“at no extra charge”) of me holding his python (stop snorting at the back). I asked him the name of the snake. “He hasn’t got one.” I told him to call it Monty. Monty was clearly bored and if a snake could be said to exude ennui, he did so in shovelfuls. If he’d had shoulders, he’d have shrugged them. He lay inert in my hands, although the newspaper clipping pinned to the wall of the museum detailing how a python had swallowed a local family dog did catch my attention. Monty would have probably preferred to smoke a pipe. After his reluctant photoshoot, I kissed him and handed him back.

The zoo was ramshackled but charming, a research centre rather than slick industrial enterprise. Labels peeled off the cages of snakes kept in the basement, and faded newspaper cuttings and posters decorated the walls. The other creepy crawlies were on the ground floor, which is where we got down to real business. The director, Stuart Douglas, reminded me a little of J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner, possessing the offbeat attractiveness that tends to attach itself to those of passionate interests. He showed us Shingleback lizards, who pair up and live monogamously, explaining that when one dies its partner commits a sort of reptilian sati and pines away next to the body, starved and heartbroken. I removed some dust from my eye.  He then moved onto the more serious stuff, bypassing the Funnel Web cage kept behind a cordon, to bring out a massive tarantula, which he waved in our direction. “She’s got an acute sense of smell”, he explained, “like a dog. She can smell your fear and will react accordingly.” I tried not to smell of fear. He went on to unfold the secret and amazing life of arachnids. Their silk contains complex proteins, both pure and very strong. The Golden Orb Weaver produces a bullet-proof web five times stronger than steel and if you need an emergency wound dressing, antiseptic homespun is as good as any bandage. In addition, tarantulas can be milked for their venom, which has been found to possess amino acids beneficial in the treatment of cardiac problems.

The study of venom in other rainforest animals is yielding extraordinary biopharmaceutical results. The Rainforest Centipede, the main reason for shaking your shoes before putting them on, produces some pretty nasty venom that will paralyse or cause extreme pain, yet the Aborigines used to deliberately inject it as a cure for arthritis. Scorpion venom produces the only known substance that regenerates brain tissue. I was worried about the exploitation of the animals but Stuart assured me that milking the venom was painless. The animal is gassed, a small electric shock is administered to produce the venom sample and the animal awakes ten minutes later slightly disgruntled, but hardly the worse for wear. As befits my love of paradox and unifying polarity, I found myself excited by this beneficence of poison and all its related metaphors.

My fortnight of adventures concluded with an understated but significant domestic nocturne in a surprising, self-sufficient environment.  I know I haven’t waxed lyrical over the posh hotel facilities or the fine restaurants and it’s not that they weren’t lovely. But the skipper’s house really thrilled me. It was run by solar power, with recycled rainwater, a wormery, compost heap and a hangar for making biofuel, set in a large garden full of nature’s bounty – rambutan, pawpaw, avocado, macadamia, lime. Huge bottles layered with fragrant woodchip, contained moonshine and other bizarre alchemical experiments. Homemade beer was siphoned from a barrel stored in the fridge. Breakfast consisted of locally grown pineapple, paw-paw and avocado with a side serving of macadamia nuts from the numerous cardboard boxes stored in the garage. There was no glass in the windows, just a very fine mesh to keep out the insects and a constant stream of fresh air. I had the best night’s sleep in years as I succumbed to the gentle nursery music of the rainforest.

It consolidated a dream, an ambition for the rest of my life – to renovate or build a little home somewhere where I can live for most of the year outdoors, barefoot and completely off grid. It does not entail being a Luddite or disdaining life’s comforts. The technology is there to support the decision. It’s just finding the right place for the right price. But the serious searching starts this year and I have never been clearer about the quality of life that I now want, that I now owe myself.

Getting warmer, as they say. Oh yes, getting very warm now.

My older sister recently recalled sneaking downstairs one night, just a few years after the end of the Second World War, to spy on our father who was sitting, sobbing over a large, heavy book. He was also holding a gun. He wasn’t a man who found it easy to show his feelings, so this was clearly disturbing behaviour. The next day when he had gone out, she went to his study and pulled out the book he had been looking at. It was an album of photographs of concentration camp victims.

My parents brought me up on the horrors of the concentration camps and the belief that my father’s role as a young bomber pilot during the war had made some small contribution to putting an end to such evil. Iconic black and white photographs of “Arbeit Macht Frei” and railway sidings etched in iron and snow were also part of my childhood arsenal of memories. Jewish friends of the family told of escaping from Nazi Europe with nothing but a good education and the clothes they stood up in. As a result, my parents’ belief that knowledge, not money, would extricate me from future predicaments, shaped my upbringing.

Eighteen months ago, I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time. I had travelled to Warsaw from Lithuania and spent a late night following the ghetto trail to its final resting place in the quiet streets adjacent to a grim-looking housing estate. A tram hummed in the distance as I stood silently at the white cattle-truck monument of the Umschlagplatz, from where Jews had been transported to Treblinka. The following morning, I took the comfortable intercity to Krakow and chose to spend a day visiting Nazi Germany’s largest and most infamous concentration camp, Auschwitz. I wanted to see the symbol of the ideology that ripped Europe apart.

I wrote down in Polish the instructions for a return ticket to Oświęcim, before climbing on board a stolid, shabby old train to settle into red plastic seats for the two-hour journey. A group of laughing teenagers played with their mobile phones, their voices becoming almost imperceptibly subdued as the dull, dry countryside slipped by.

The guide books informed me that Auschwitz-Birkenau would be unfathomably shocking, horrific. That was bound to be the case, but I didn’t want to buy into a bequest of words or be influenced by emotions that didn’t belong to me. It was too enormous for that and warranted truthful response, however uncomfortable or unexpected. The weight of history was heavy enough to generate certain expectations about what lay ahead but my raw responses would be the tightrope to be walked between shared experience and shared expectation.

I wanted to walk from the station instead of taking the bus, intending to visit the main Auschwitz camp first before moving on to Birkenau, a half hour walk away. The route, however, was badly signposted and I took several wrong turnings before finding myself walking along a narrow path adjacent to a row of cottages, at the end of which ran a railway. An elderly man was working in his garden, which backed onto a rough patch of grassland through which the lines cut and continued their iron stretch towards the south west and north east. A black cattletruck rested on the rails, negative twin to the one at Umschlagplatz.  Although morning, it was already hot, my shoulders were reddening and heat haze hovered above the uneven sleepers. I could hear no sound but the rhythmic nudge of hoe meeting dirt. I stopped to contemplate the railway, sensed a kernel of alarm on the back of my neck, and turned right to walk along the spur through the gap between houses. Then I saw it. The arched and turreted gate of Birkenau with the railway line curving through the scrub to meet it. I walked along the line, meadow flowers pushing through the cracks, and crossed the main road to stand in the photograph already embedded in my head. I could hear my heart beating.

The small, unobtrusive visitors section presented a list on the wall of the categories of undesirables who were incarcerated and exterminated here: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, communists, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals, along with a request for silence and no food or drink as a mark of respect. Bar one or two people, and the now completely muted teenagers from the train, there was no one else around.

I began the long route around the edge of the camp, starting with the surviving wooden barracks that smelled of forest and pre-war primary school. Wilted floral tributes lay just inside the entrances. The heat was almost unbearable. The heat generated by four hundred people crammed into the bunks of each barrack must have been more so. I imagined the fierce scramble to access the window during the summer months and the fight, as bitter as the cold, for a middle bunk during the winter. Barrack after barrack after barrack of incarcerated bodies. I gave up trying to calculate the number of people that had been crammed into this small section alone.

I tried to outmanoeuvre a Polish family that trailed me around the huts, voices clattering in time to the camera shutter, slurping on coke, crunching on crisps, emitting a continuing drone of comment and camcorder. They had pasted over reverence with the essentials of a day trip. I questioned my own intolerance, bearing in mind the scarcity of visitors even at this peak holiday time. The search for knowledge should always supersede reverence, for reverence is often a blind, empty ritual. But I’m old fashioned enough to prefer to mark my respect with small acts of self-discipline. I cleared my mental tutting and moved on.

Regaining a pocket of silence, I cut through the gates to the main aisles that ran between barrack sections, the walls long gone, marked out on the ground like the remains of a camp site or cricket pitch. The Angelus rang out from the nearby Church of Divine Mercy, its tones well-meaning but sounding like mockery.

There are many myths surrounding this place, one of which is that the birds do not sing here. That is complete nonsense. Beautiful birds of every hue and song are abundant. As I stood in silence, the “men’s barracks” (which struck me as a possible euphemism) on one side, the Gypsy camp on the other, one bird dive-bombed me. Screaming, it flew around and around my head, warning me away. She must have had a nest nearby. Out of the spiral of frenzy and fear arose my own choking breath as it caught a memory pattern and flew with its circular chant. A close relative had infiltrated my childhood with ignorance and racism, punctuated by the hate-filled mantra, “Hitler had the right idea, you know. Hitler had the right idea.” I swatted away this needlepoint, stuck under my skin like scurvy, an itch, a parasite. I walked away from this person years ago, but the voice remained. Shooing away the echoes in my head, as the bird screeched, “Hitler had the right idea”, I clenched my fists and shouted to the sky, “Hitler had the right idea? I dare you. I bloody dare you to stand where I am standing right now and repeat that phrase. Hitler had the right idea? Coward. I fucking dare you.”

Anger assuaged and the voice exorcised, the bird flew away. I moved on to the site where Mengele tortured his victims, and laid wild flowers nearby.

I rested from the heat of myself and the day in the calm and shade of a copse of oak, birch and beech. As I sat gazing at a pond, I realised it was croaking, and watched as hundreds of little green heads popped up between the lily pads and dived back down, leaving a dull plop and a ring of water. It was a fertile breeding ground for frogs, and I let out an involuntary laugh of delight at their antics. I suddenly caught sight of the sign to the right of the pond. The ashes of those exterminated in the nearby gas chambers had been dumped here. Laughter dissolved into the water as my thoughts turned cartwheels. Juxtaposition is everything and knowledge is its serpent, always biting at the heel of beauty. If I knew nothing of this place, if there were no barbed wire or barracks, I would think it a pretty site with its flowers, trees, and fairy cake Carpathians lining the horizon. Whatever shadow is cast across its geography by virtue of its history, there’s no denying that some beauty remains, because the richness of life remains. Nature cares not one jot what we do to each other and it will continue to thrive whether we exist or not. It was my first, genuinely sober thought of the day.

It was the trigger of the small things, though, that crushed me. A large glass box containing confiscated cutlery, combs, nick-nacks, the detritus of daily life brought me to my knees, sobbing. Sobbing because it was not the barracks or barbed wire or broken walls of the gas chambers, but a single fork, a piece of skewed metalwork, which had lasted longer than the human flesh that created it, which was the reminder that our bodies are more vulnerable and precious than the crap we leave behind. These irrelevant remnants highlighted the enormity of the monstrosity that was committed here. Another homily pronounces that to comprehend Auschwitz, it is best to imagine the suffering of a few people you know and love, not two million you don’t. I disagree. Try imagining a million people. Try to imagine two. All processed through this efficient killing machine, truckload after truckload after truckload, like mere handfuls of disposable dust.

Technology enhanced the Nazis’ ability to kill on a massive, impersonal scale. In a world that continues to engender atrocities, it was a blueprint for moral judgements based on the wedge that removes direct human contact from the equation.

In the face of this Behemoth, I stand in awe of those who stood up to the regime, or who cleverly and clandestinely did their bit to undermine it or help Jews and others to escape. It made me face hard questions about myself, about my ability to respond to oppression with truth and courage. What would I be willing to put on the line for the sake of a life? My job, my home, my family? My own life? For whom? What criteria do I use to value one life over another?

Auschwitz is a reminder that such atrocity is only ever a breath of an idea away, a construct of the darkest, most complicit part of ourselves. The people who built it were not monsters, they were human beings. They were our kin and they were supported by people just like us. And so it continues – complicity, overt and subtle, with the abhorrence of ‘other’. We have watched the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides, the BNP’s  membership continues to grow, and new-age conspiracy theories still dredge up the same anti-Semitic propaganda that the Nazis proliferated. In the meantime, staunchly Catholic Poland sits uneasily as guardian of this major World Heritage Site while homosexuals remain the only represented group of detainees to never have been invited to formal commemorations.

There are groups of people that are an uncomfortable fit within our field of ideals and interactions. We don’t understand them. We may not like them. So if they were one day rounded up for extermination, ask yourself – what would you do?

“I’ve been thinking lately about how you told me, years ago, that there were worthwhile people and others who weren’t so worthwhile, the ones who got insulin when they had diabetes, and the others who didn’t. And I agreed, fool that I was. Now they’ve invented new divisions and now I belong to the worthless group. It serves me right.”

The Jewish Wife from Fears and Miseries in the Third Reich by Berthold Brecht

“I don’t want to be considered a hero. Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty.”

Miep Gies

 

“People ask all the time what I learned in the camps. But the camps weren’t therapy. What do you think these places were? Universities? We didn’t go there to learn. … My advice, go to the theatre, if you want catharsis. Please. Go to literature. Don’t go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing.”

Ilana in ‘The Reader’

 

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Martin Niemöller

*************************************************************************************************

Gas lamps are hissing apologies into the Middlesex night. She climbs into the cabinet and allows herself to be bound to the chair with ropes about her neck, waist and wrists.

We sit at the table in the semi-darkness and link our hands, calling upon our Heavenly Father as we intone in vociferous vibrato, “lead, kindly light, amid th’encircling gloom, lead Thou me on”, inducing in her the harmony of our circle. She breathes deeply, freeing herself from care and anxiety, building and shaping her psychic energies that the manifestations may be displayed with greater power and clarity.

Bright stars flit about the room, and a stringed instrument lying on the table is taken by spirit hands and played, producing the sweetest music. The cabinet curtain parts and a pale figure, dressed in white, emerges.

No. 30 Queensdown Road was the bane of my life, its boarded-up presence representing twenty years of council neglect. It housed a frustrated family on the upper storey, and the anonymous presence of the junkies who lurked in the dilapidated basement during the dark hours. Their shadows crouched among broken glass, fag-ends and needles, hugging a bivouac fire, streetlight catching eyes through cracks in the hoarding before they evaporated into the bowels of the building. Confrontation drove those with strength to jump the garden fences at the rear, or break through the basement flats to make their escape.

Base and bastard child of bureaucratic denial, the house emitted a signal of despair. It bought into its own personality, a decaying cavity that swallowed cats and broken furniture in exchange for fire.

We averted disaster many times, our senses augmented by a constant state of apprehension, spotting the ominous crackle and flicker shadow of an untamed flame or the scent of smoke drift before it took hold.  So imagine the dread feeling of coming home to encounter fire engines outside the house. One of the legal occupants had carelessly discarded her cigarette and the whole building was a blackened shell. For many weeks afterwards, the adjacent houses endured the stale smell of smoulder, which penetrated the hallway carpets, dido rails, ceiling roses, shutters and other original accoutrements of Victorian desirability. Soon afterwards, the building was auctioned and refurbished. Disaster is always a catalyst for alchemical change, the crucible of fire that cleanses the past. The homunculus of WW was wrested from the jaws of the dragon, to be nurtured as a child of promise.

At the peak of the smallpox pandemic in 1872, an expanding populace rapidly paved over the death and mysteries of the borough to assure its transformation from Home County to dense London suburb. Only half of the houses in the newly named Queen’s Down Road had been built, but they rose as sturdy and proud as the merchants and middle classes they would accommodate. The Hackney carriages were already queuing at the junction of Down’s Road, touting for business to the city or docks.

One gets the impression that the builders exhausted their passion for the project long before it was complete. Houses 1-10 are wider, more ornamental, tiled and puffed up with the shock of the new, before settling into a homogenous architectural bent, the odd frill or furbelow added as an afterthought. No.30 looks much like its siblings, the configuration of its door arch and dragons-teeth embellishments only subtly different from the rest of the terrace.

The road still hugs the Lammas Land of the Downs, which confers the right of legal trespass only after haymaking, when one may step across the liminal boundary set by Hecate’s feast day as the sun begins to fade to grey. Beneath flocks of silver seagulls and avenues of London Plane, hide remnants of Roman pottery, railway tunnels and, so it is whispered, secret bunkers.

Disgruntled Victorians used to write to the local press to complain about the “cesspit” of youths who gathered there at dusk.

An ancient spring lies beneath the south-west of the park, “a considerable spring … continually flowing”, daughter of the once famous Hackney Brook now culverted under the western footpath. It still runs beneath Amhurst Road, the waning eddies and currents below inversely proportional to the raging menace and violence above, a retaliation against its enforced purdah.

Hackney is underpinned by currents unknown, a definition or state of mind, where the mundane has always brushed hands with the lunatic fringe: harbinger of orphans, table turners, templars, dissenters and asylums for the insane.

Despite its gentrification, No.30 continued to be the focal point of disturbances, an elemental maelstrom wreaking havoc upon the neighbours. Water overflowed from faulty guttering, seeping into adjoining kitchens, imprinting Rorschach stains upon the walls. The west wind that swept across the rare, unfettered urban space in front of the house, fed the cyclical breath of vicious, screaming arguments, usually worse in the lower ground sections. Computers crashed, the dog circled cold spots and pungent smells lingered for weeks.

Environmental services discovered a blocked drain. A psychic discovered blocked energy. The spirit of a domestic servant who had died in childbirth could not separate from the earth, and her recalcitrance was a vehicle for disorder. Who and when was she?

William Price of Stepney was probably the first resident of No.30 along with his much younger, childless wife Blanch. He was an East India merchant, a member of a wider human web trading in silk, saltpetre and tea. Some of his colleagues may have ended up as inhabitants of Pembroke House (where London Fields station now sits), the private lunatic asylum for employees of the East India Company who had buckled under the twin pressures of heat and opium.

Our stubborn spirit may have been one of Price’s servants, Frances or Ellen.

Perhaps she worked for subsequent tenants, Mrs Smith, Miss Cook, Mrs Casey, Charles Stewart, Percival Costerlow or the last occupier of the Victorian era, Jacob Louis, a gentlemen of no known family who later died alone in December 1909.

We may never know. Excepting the census, historical directories only record the names of the head of the house, usually men, but sometimes spinsters and widows. Wives, children and servants – those who are owned – slip into the chasm between class and government data.

Young, beautiful and dark-haired, Florence Cook possesses a captivating allure. She once heard the voices of angels as a child and has been generating poltergeist activity ever since. Embarrassed by being levitated at a recent tea party, she returns to the safety of her family sitting room in Eleanor Road. In the presence of her rapt audience, she channels a message from the other side as her hand scribbles across the page.

Like her contemporary faery child, Alice, Florence engages with a land where words and truth are seen from a different perspective. Making her way to this neighbouring parallel road, a journey she claims to be long and exhausting, she meets Thomas Blyton, editor of The Spiritualist and secretary of the Dalston Association of Inquirers into Spiritualism. Through his guidance, she develops a considerable range of psychic phenomena for the delectation of his growing membership. The Association is soon healthy enough to move to a permanent home at 53 Sigdon Road, just by Hackney Downs station.

During séances, Florence intimates the existence of an emerging spirit, offering tantalising trance messages and glimpses of a ghostly face shrouded in linen. A phantom lies in wait, a mere potentiality to mesmerise sitters and fellow mediums, while Florence engages in a game of Arabian Nights and learns her craft. She focuses her psychic powers to gently colour in the outlines of an apparition frantic to perform to the entranced crowds of the respectable curious.

As if impatient for incarnation, the spirit becomes increasingly uncontrollable. Furniture is thrown against the wall as Florence is borne into the air by invisible hands, which rip and rapidly replace pieces of clothing from her body. Disturbed by the experience, she abandons the society and once again confines her sittings to her home, along with her parents, siblings, household maid and paying guests. She renames this cosy clique the Hackney Circle.

The psychic who cleansed the intractable ghost also revealed a ley line running straight through the house. Powerlines are not always positive and geomagnetic energy can interact with its environment, hungry for living, creative force. So be careful what you feed it.

Ghostly energies teach us that death does not deal in absolutes (apart from the absolute fact of it), nor do ley lines. They link the structures of human hands as surely as they link the megaliths of ideas within psychic landscapes. They are a paradox, a looking glass, as intricate and metaphorical as a line of Tarot cards. Make of their poetic truth what you will. Always.

Two local witches decided to dowse the park. A spattering of energy lines makes a confusing criss-cross where the brook still flows, but two distinct lines, one for each witch, appear to intersect at a point where WW now dwells.

The shorter ley cuts across the park from south east to north west. South it passes through the New Testament Church of God on Cricketfield Road, first registered by the Presbyterian Church of England in 1872.

It seems likely that it then runs through St. Augustine’s Hall, the clubhouse for the Victoria Park Harriers, which was once a Victorian Church Hall.

More significantly, it makes its way north directly through the ruined Victorian chapel at the heart of Abney Park Cemetery, where Catherine Booth, mother of the Salvation Army, now rests. She is recorded as having made an appearance to Mr John Lobb of Victoria Park Road, during a Victorian séance. She asked, “what do you think of my grand husband now?” The boast may strike as an overstated gesture, given the vast distance to travel from Heaven to South Hackney.

The witches dowsed the chapel widdershins, for it is a busy junction, bathed in the energy of death.

The larger ley line may offer more substantial intrigue; the structures that dot its route join up into a compelling narrative.

From WW, it runs south, again through the church on the corner, through St John’s graveyard, to skirt past the 16th century St Augustine’s Tower, built on the site of an earlier Templar Church.

The Templars held substantial lands in Hackney and until the 19th century a Templar house stood at the top of Church Street (now the Narroway), opposite Dalston Lane. These mysterious Knights of St John of Jerusalem, with their secret initiations and rites, kissed the arse of Baphomet here. Council Tax payers have been doing the same ever since.

The Borough coat of arms depicts the Augustine Tower flanking the Templar colours, underlined by the symbol of water, the constant flowing factor beneath the pavements. As if to prove the point, the line passes through a well, now buried under the Bohemia Place bus depot, once supplied by a reservoir in which sea shells were discovered.

Templar references begin to align with pleasing exposition as the line traverses the church of St John of Jerusalem (1848) and straight through St Barnabas at Mile End, the heretical Seal of Solomon, symbol of ancient Testament and modern witchcraft, embedded into the south window. The current of conspiracy grows stronger as the line charges through the centre of Canary Wharf Tower, the obelisk built by lizards, arriving at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, gateway to the stars.

Florence lies unconscious in the cabinet while she exudes ectoplasm, the mysterious substance produced from her own body to manifest the form of another being. Katie King is that creature, liar, cheat, daughter of a buccaneer, who now perambulates the room bobbing and smiling while we hear sobbing and moaning from within the cabinet, as if the manifestation were draining the energy from the host.

Spirit communion with mortals is a blessed and painful matter and full form materialisation in such good light is rare. How solid Katie seems, her hand smooth and warm as she flirts, kisses and exhorts us to engage. Her white dress catches on the table, a shot of black taffeta revealed beneath. Katie announces that her time allotted on earth is three years.

From WW, the major ley line heads north through the western estate boundary of Hackney’s lost palace, Brooke House, named for the water that surrounded it. The house, recorded as far back as 1409, was built on the area of land between Lower Clapton Road and Kenninghall Road, about which one of the witches categorically states has ‘bad energy’. King Henry VIII stayed at the house with Jane Seymour during his reconciliation with daughter Mary.

Its gardens were famous. Pepys mentions seeing oranges growing for the first time here. There was also an old mulberry tree (ruled by Mercury, and therefore beneficial for all ills of the mouth), claimed by its owner to be one of the original mulberries planted by the Templars.

In 1759 Brooke House became a private mental asylum, in ignorance of the cardinal rule to never mix lunatics with ley lines. After bomb damage during the war, it was demolished. A neighbour recalls church treasure being discovered on the site during an excavation in the 1960s, although, like much that is precious in Hackney, it seems to have been swallowed up without official reference.

The ley travels through a grey area (of both geography and fact) in the Northwold Road vicinity, where the only discovery of note is that excavations uncovered a complete Acheulian-type hand axe, before continuing north through the gothic-style St Ignatius Jesuit Church at Stamford Hill, and Oakwood Park at Southgate, once owned by Geoffrey de Mandeville, where an igloo shaped ice well was built in 1870 by a homeopathic chemist; onwards through the old ‘Gallows of Gallis Hill’, before arriving, drenched with death and madness, at a surprising and enigmatic location on the outskirts of London.

They have turned against her. A prophet has no honour in her own country. An unruly ruffian, oblivious to danger and decorum, seizes Katie at a sitting, to prove that she is but a dramatic persona of Florence. Human hand should never interfere with ectoplasm and it is a miracle that the shock did not destroy the body tied up in the cabinet.

We know that Katie King is a genuine etheric materialisation. Certainly, Florence and Katie bear a striking resemblance in a dim light. But look closer. Katie is taller and heavier than Florence and has red hair whereas Florrie’s hair is dark. Florrie has pierced ears, Katie does not.

We carefully examine every part of the cabinet while Miss Cook is searched by Mrs Amelia and Miss Carline Corner. Nothing could be concealed there. The seals on the ropes and bindings are intact.

Mr William Crookes, besotted with Katie’s beauty, has undertaken a project of scientific corroboration. That the spirit reciprocates his tender regard is a touching testimony to his faith, not, as scurrilous rumours would suggest, the machinations of a mundane affair.

In timely fashion, Katie has announced her departure and now sits on the floor making up bouquets for her friends to keep in remembrance of her. We gaze sadly at the white clad maiden, blossom of exquisite youth cleansed of all past misdemeanours, and we too yearn to be made over new. The perfume of the lilies of the valley and pink geranium epitomises the pale, delicate sweetness of her lovely face and our own grace notes that mourn the rare and magic moments of lost innocence.

Our ley line reaches its final destination at Camlet Moat in Trent Park, adjacent to the campus of Middlesex University. The ghost of Geoffrey de Mandeville, who drowned in the moat, wanders here. Mystics agree that the name has been abbreviated over the years from ‘Camelot’, a theory compounded by excavations in the 1920s, which revealed the basis of an ancient drawbridge and dungeons. An obelisk was planted on the spot in 1934 and there is also a holy well, the symbolic male and female conjoined to produce the elixir of life.

Could this be the hidden home of the Knights Templar, guardians of the grail, custodians of Earth’s mysteries? Pagan rites are evident here, clouties, stones and candles offered up to the sanctity and power of the location. What do they know about this place?

Camlet Moat is also the pivotal location in the theory of Christopher Street’s Earth Stars, who describes London’s ancient sacred sites forming a precise pattern of geometry, including pentagrams and stars, reflecting the same pattern upon which the megaliths of Stonehenge were laid out. London is a vast temple, its web of stars a mandala, its soul.

Street also draws attention to 2012, year of the London Olympics and Mayan end-time. He believes that London’s Earthstars geometry has an association with St John’s biblical City of Revelation, the new Jerusalem, which is said to appear in the end of the world.

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”

From gateway to gateway. As above, so below; a fearful and wondrous symmetry where every man and woman is a star, shaped by matter, geography and time. As our past is embedded into our neurosystem, a building’s past in embedded into its walls, soaked and seeping with the symbiotic spirit of human energy.

Feel it, if you dare. For good or for ill, dredge up the ghosts from their graves and hold them up to the light. Jerusalem is the ground upon which you stand, Art is a beautiful heresy, and what’s good enough for God is good enough for us.

Meanwhile, the inexorable spiral dance of Death keeps whirling.

Let us create.

We knew what to expect upon arrival. I’ve been to Egypt and there’s a North African tradition of haranguing visitors into buying unwanted tours, taxis or tat. Some hustlers are so charming and well-spoken, I can see how difficult it must be to resist. In fact, it’s almost tempting to pay them for the entertainment value. Parrying some of the more sophisticated blandishments turned into a game of wits. French is useful in Tangier, and for some reason I found it much easier to assert my rights in faulty Gallic vernacular, particularly when a last-ditch hard-sell by one prospective guide tried to use that regular media weapon, fear.

“Special bargain. There are four of you. Fifteen Euros for a tour. That’s for all of you.”

“Non monsieur.”

“The Medina is huge. Very complicated. You will get lost.”

“Non. Monsieur. Nous sommes très indépendante.”

“You may be independent. But you are not safe. It is very dangerous. There are many immigrants. Many problems.”

“Dangereuse? J’habite en Hackney. I spit on your dangereuse.”

And with the concept of famous last words swimming through my thirsty head, three mad dogs and an Englishwoman headed off to the souk.

The male stomachs were desperate for fuel and after a heated ten-minute argument about choice of restaurants, we found ourselves coerced into a perfectly respectable eatery where the service was indifferent but the couscous was good, and the band included a gurning Jack Lemmon playing an oud.

Mint tea was served. Phil gazed into the layer of green leaves floating on water and declared. “I think I can see a fish in there.”

Against a backdrop of global financial apocalypse, it is worth remembering that street markets are the economic equivalent of the cockroach. It gave me comfort to be part of the hustle, humour and sheer energy that coursed through the winding alleys of the souk, its shabby fortifications housing braid, cottons, buttons, soft leather slippers and fly-encrusted dates. The shops presented a kaleidoscopic montage of a bygone age: a barber wielding his cut-throat razor, a row of patisseries behind dirty glass or an alcove selling second hand TVs, their flickering blue lights bathing a group of mesmerised children. Motorbikes with trailers careered up the narrow streets, kids dangling precariously off the back while afternoon prayers boomed through loudspeakers embedded in crumbling walls.

Hassle was a constant factor. “You English?” would precipitate lengthy negotiations for escape. I began to feign incomprehension and John resorted to shouting “Polski” whenever approached. It worked. My physical space was occasionally invaded, mostly through carelessness rather than design, but a sharp look invoked abject apologies and immediate retreat. I must be acquiring a matriarchal mien.

Being offered drugs in Morocco is de rigeur. We had already sussed out the day trippers (in every sense) on the boat over. Don’t buy them. If the authorities catch you, you will spend time in a prison that will make Midnight Express look like a Travelodge. On second thoughts …

My ears suddenly tuned in to what sounded scarily like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

“Lovely jubbly. Best price. Lovely jubbly.”

He caught my eye.

“Come in and have a shuftie. Have a shuftie. Lovely jubbly. Asda price.”

Phil wanted a fez. I took him to one side and asked him how much was wanted for it.

“Ten”

“Ten what?”

“Er, ten – I don’t know.”

“Well, haggle.”

“I don’t really know how to.”

“Right. I’ll start you off. Monsieur. Combien?”

“Dix”.

Pretending to be completely astounded.

“Dix?! (Looking aghast). Dix?! Trop cher. À cet endroit (pointing), c’est plus – er – cheaper – sur le corner – er – c’est cinque.”

“OK. Seize. “

“Seize?! (With appropriate tragic looks.) Seize?! For a fez? J’ai six enfants pour manger (sic)! Non. Cinque. Right, Phil. Take over.”

He got his fez for five. Euros or Dirham, I have no idea. But hey, result. Haggling is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. If you’re not sure how to do it, just nick bits of script from The Life of Brian and practise your fake exits.

Phil was so chuffed with his new skill that he evaporated into the market, returning an hour later with a fake Rolex and three children in tow. We could only stare in amazement and ask him how much he had paid for them.

Rather perturbingly, he decided to wear his fez for the rest of the day. It was like being accompanied by a tall, red beacon (no chance of blending into the background for our spying activities) and made for much merriment locally. A cyclist chuckled “Ali Baba” as he wheeled past. “Ali Baba. Allemand!” shouted another. Thank God for that. What shame would be brought upon the empire if they actually believed we were British?

We headed for the Kasbah, humming the obligatory Clash soundtrack in unison. We passed two schoolgirls in leggings and lace hijabs, beating up their younger brother in the street. A boy approached us and offered to show us around. We declined, cynicism weighing into our innocent interactions with the thoughts of having to pay for the privilege. Despite our protestations, he stuck to us like a limpet as we explored the beautiful, deserted alleys at the top of the hill. He explained that the Kasbah was now mostly inhabited by foreigners, with rents to match. They own the art galleries and riads, all accommodating luxurious furnishings or secret rooftop gardens within their cool, stone walls.

“Have you got any Black Sabbath? Paranoid?”

Sadly, we’d failed to bring our CD collections with us.

He looked at me quizzically. “Which one is your husband?” Jer retorted: “She’s too expensive for any of us.” After discussions about my potential monetary value, they worked out that I’m worth about $150. The lads did threaten to sell me for a couple of camels, which I’d say would be a fair exchange.

The boy showed me to the ladies’ mosque, a small, charming building in a quiet, empty quarter. I had brought my scarf and a long sleeved cardigan, and asked a man sweeping the floor in the lobby whether I could visit. He declined and turned his back on me. No admittance for the infidel. After his tour duty, our little friend refused to accept money, shattering the stereotype we had come to expect. Thus does fractured travel expand the mind.

Walking back down the hill to the souks, a trek punctuated with more mint tea, I noticed a doorway, leading to a descent of steps into an indoor area that looked like a mosque. Women huddled in a corner, deep in conversation, their heads uncovered, shoes on their feet. Not a mosque, then. A woman exited onto the street, caught my look of curiosity, smiled enigmatically and moved on.

A part of me desperately wanted to know what was going on in there, and I suppose information is useful up to a point. Sometimes, though, the unexplained is far more interesting. The imagination can conjecture mysterious and exciting scenarios within the safe citadel of its darkest secrets.

I then started a conversation with a local woman who had been visiting her mother in the Medina. Farsia was a Berber and she told me about her traditions, how life has changed for women in modern times, her job as a teacher and how she named her children.

She looked at me. “Which one is your husband?”

I lied. “They’re my brothers.”

“Do you have children?”

I shook my head.

“Here, if a woman cannot have children, her husband finds someone else.”

I wanted to proclaim my shock, but paused for a moment as I remembered that such action is not entirely unknown in England either.

She led us to the modern part of Tangier, past the Catholic cathedral and Italian villas, to the Grand Mosque, explaining en route about the ritual of the women’s weekly ablutions and how holy day was spent cooking good things and choosing something lovely to wear before spending quality time with the family.

After discovering that we would be leaving on the evening boat, she sighed. “That is a shame. I would take you home for dinner and give you couscous.” I believed her.

I only had a taste of Tangier. I didn’t have time to explore the old haunts of the great writers and artists who have been inspired to stay in this place. Actually, I didn’t really think about them. It’s one degree of separation too many. Sometimes when I travel, I prefer to kick back and watch the rich diversity of humanity swarming before me, and let my inner eye watch myself watching. I find myself wondering what it would be like to be born elsewhere, within a different culture, with a different language, reference points and expectations, and I marvel at the accident of DNA that has dictated the fundamentals of my life. To absorb the existence of those people is to absorb the richness of the world itself. It lifts my spirits to know that every single life is precious.

Even the hagglers.