The Real Pirates of Penzance

My journey to Cornwall Saturday morning began at 6:35 at the bus stop just outside my front door.

It's the nearest stop and serviced only by a 'cracker box cum ghetto' bus: one of those London buses that is indeed red, but missing the upper storey in order to clear dodgy railway overpasses in dodgy neighbourhoods. Not that my neighbourhood is dodgy - unless I cross over the road. My side of the street: lovely Edwardian blocks designed by architects back when architects still cared. The other side: brown brick, broken security doors, pit bull terriers, children who literally kill other children.

In short, typical London demi-socialist idyll. But back to the bus.

I hadn't planned to take the 360 bus until about five minutes before I left home to begin my journey. I reckoned I'd drag my slitty-eyed carcass down to Vauxhall station on foot, grab the fleet-wheeled Victoria line to Oxford Circus and change to the Bakerloo to Paddington. Simples. But the weekend bag (full of, among too many other things, the computer I'm typing on) was wearing me down, so I locked the door, set the alarm and grunted the 20 metres or so to the bus stop.

Now, I'm no optimist when it comes to London buses. They're frequently shit, but, like shit, also a necessity. I read the schedule, which is about as reliable as pulp fiction if it's reality you're after, and noted that the buses came to this stop every 10 to 12 minutes.

What I failed to notice until 15 frustrating minutes later was that I was reading the weekday schedule and applying it to a Saturday. And because I love to salt a self-inflicted wound, I realised I'd been referring to the schedule not only for the wrong day, but also for the wrong part of the morning. The buses only come every 10 to 12 minutes, I now know extremely well, after about 8am, Monday to Friday.

On Saturday, they come at 12, 32 and 50 past the hour until late morning. Doh. (And what's most shocking is that this bus stop is literally within spitting distance of my bedroom window, and I've lived next to it for three years. So much for pathos.)

I'll be fine, I thought. If I'm picked up at 6:50, that still leaves 40 minutes from the moment I step on the imminent 360 until my train leaves Paddington. Surely, I thought in an optimistic burst of holiday euphoria, the gods will smile on me, and this will come to pass.

It didn't, of course. The bus was seven minutes late. The Nationwide cash point at Vauxhall station - and I swear to you this is true AND certainly some sort of conspiracy of the deities - took nearly five minutes to complete my transaction from the time I slipped my card in. It took in the card and held it - nay, cradled and perhaps suckled it for all I know - for a good 40 panicky seconds before asking me if I wouldn't mind please entering my PIN, as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. I said 'hello' to 7:10am before I set foot on the Victoria line.

Leaving out other minor annoyances - except for not understanding at Oxford Circus that the northbound Bakerloo platform is literally adjacent the northbound Victoria, and letting a standing train pull away in a colossal schoolboy error that cost me another four minutes - I eventually bounded up the escalator onto the main floor at Paddington just in time to see my train sleepily drifting away from platform one.

My next mistake was telling anyone about it.

"You'll need to buy another ticket, I'm afraid," said the man with the heavy west-Midlands accent behind the bullet-proof glass (and now you know why it's bullet-proof). I said I wasn't going to go to stupid Penzance after all. "Fair enough," he said.

It is about here that the mind really fucking boggles. Those of us who, by dint of whatever insanity we entertain, continue to live in Britain know how Kafka-esque making a train journey can be. I'm always surprised when I leave a station at the other end of the line that I'm not played off by a quartet of singing dwarfs, thanking me for traveling with Southwest or Whatever Trains and handing me a chocolate. Even so, you miss your train, you could usually just grab the next one, no harm done.

Not if you've booked with, in this case, First Great Western several weeks in advance and are, it turns out, tied to a specific, scheduled return journey under penalty of financial ruin. This means you have to be perfect twice in one week, and I just don't know how to do that.

I staggered about for a bit, allowing the reality to slowly, painfully settle in. I had paid £44 for my entire journey. I missed the outbound leg of that journey by about a minute. And if I really wanted to go to Cornwall and stay in the lovely hotel with the sea-view room I'd also booked several weeks ago, I'd have to cough up another - sit down and hold tight - £83. I threw my bag, computer and all, to the floor of Paddington railway station and shouted "fuck."

I'm smarter than this, I thought. Surely the internet is the answer. I bought a coffee and sat in a wi-fi zone. I next bought a voucher for 90 minutes worth of BT wi-fi and went back to the drawing board.

£83 again, now with an additional £5.88 tacked on for internet use. (See what I mean about salt and wounds?)

I'd had enough, and there was only one thing to do. Eat the £83, pay for it with what little 'emergency savings' I had left and never think of it again.

This would have been an extremely successful strategy - one deeply rooted, for a change, in adult-mindedness and born of essential wisdom - had someone checked that I had the correct ticket at any point during the shitting five and a half hour journey to Penzance.

And so it came down to this: Do I sit there for five and a half hours with the wrong ticket on the wrong train, essentially a fugitive, and stress myself with the various arrest and police record scenarios that would inevitably roll one into the other in my over-active Protestant-guilty imagination? Or do I console myself with the knowledge that I've done the right thing, regardless of whether or not anyone clacked a hole in my ticket?

Of course, I felt a total mug when I got off the train. The only thing that made me feel any better was being here in the sunshine, amongst the rolling hills in verdant, wild Cornwall. My next stop was the Penzance bus station (boy, do I know how to travel or WHAT?) to catch a hedgerow-dodging, tree-branch-snapping double decker bus to the picturesque village of Sennen near Land's End.

When I finally got there, I felt safe, for it is the part of Cornwall that no railway can touch. Those last 12 miles of Britain are like a green lunar surface: remote, unspoiled, oddly beautiful - and seemingly far, far away from the surreality of the British railway system. I wandered down to a restaurant on the beach at Sennen Cove, ate grilled scallops and monkfish on skewers and left the railway pirates at the end of their line of influence in happy - albeit slightly cursed - Penzance.

Jesus is watching: give him a blanket

For the established religions to 'work,' it's best to reject science. In few places is this practiced more completely and comically than in those postulates that aim to prove the existence of a personal Jesus Christ.

Was there really a Jesus Christ? Christians to this day seek physical proof of His existence in order to historically substantiate their beliefs and thereby establish their God, religion and themselves as “the Ones.” They point to scrolls and rotting cloth sheets as evidence that in the Bible is written the Truth about Jesus Christ, whoever He may or may not have been. (They're not the only religious camp to try this on, so don't think I'm just picking on the well meaning, poor, vilified, victimised, hollow-eyed whole of Christianity. That would be mean!)

Was there really a physical Jesus Christ? The better question is, “Why does it matter to you so much?”

But the best and most entertaining question would be, 'Where is Jesus now?' Biblical texts tell us, or many tell us that they tell us, that the Christ, upon His resurrection and disinterment, ascended into Heaven. The Christ became airborne of God’s volition and headed straight up into the sky, no doubt startling and inspiring a small crowd of onlookers, who'd never seen anything other than a bird or butterfly do such an impossible thing.

So, where is Jesus now? It depends on many things. Is the Christ actually still “of the flesh” up there? If so, He must be very cold in the vacuum of space. How fast does Jesus’ shivering person travel? Can He exceed the speed of light, believed to be the maximum velocity of all tangible things? Some Christians might say He is capable of traveling faster than light, but that seems an inadmissible physical favouritism. I mean, if Jesus Christ could outstrip light on the celestial racetrack, then nuts could someday fall up from the tree. (Couldn't they?)

How far away is Heaven, anyway? Is it an actual place? Giving Jesus the benefit of the doubt, which would constitute an appropriate act of Christian kindness, if He died at age 30, as the bible says, and was splitting along at nearly 190,000 miles per second, He could be at most 1,980 light years away, presuming He hasn’t yet reached Heaven, which He may or may not have done, because no one really knows where it is. (Do they?)

In January, 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope detected a collection of isolated, intergalactic 'red giant' stars near the Virgo galaxy cluster, about 60 million light years from Earth, or 30,500 times further away than Jesus’ current, or roughly current, position.

Why, then, have no astronomers seen Jesus? Is He not full of radiance, as the good book says? If He emits His own light and is so relatively close to us, surely Hubble should have sent back a Polaroid by now.

And I like to think he'd be smiling and waving at us. I really, really do. (Don't you?)

So, kiddies, before you lay down your heads tonight, spare a thought for the freezing Saviour of Mankind. And, if you're lucky enough to be falling asleep in a middle-class home, do the right thing and offer Him a jumper.

Une saison en paresse

Unlike Arthur Rimbaud, the influential and at times downright wacked-out 19th century French poet, I have never smoked opium nor enjoyed, if that's the right word, opiates of any stripe for which the name was not first gently scrawled across a prescription pad. I know nothing of heroin, except that it would seem to be a really, really bad idea to seek out someone who sells it, let alone try and most certainly buy and buy and buy it. My sole insertion of a suppository made of morphine yielded only one of the most psychologically and physically vacuous evenings of my life - and given the gaping three-months-deep void in which I spent the winter just gone, that's really saying something.

No, narcotics and I don't mix. But sloth and I most definitely became more than acquainted this past winter. I lay around the house so convincingly that if a casual observer from space managed to stay awake to monitor the duration of the sorry situation that did not unfold on the surface of the backwater planet to which she'd been regrettably assigned, she'd have shot herself with a ray gun, exasperated by the sheer futility of it all. I spent many, many days between January and March indulging in the false bliss of the nearly total absence of the urge to create, a status affixed by David Mamet to the definition of the word 'decadence.'

I have been brilliantly decadent. Some days, I awoke in the late morning angry at the fact of sunlight. Another day leering and mocking, arms folded, staring at me cockily, secure in its knowledge that, if this was another day to be wasted, it was all my fault. And I'm sure I wasted many probably beautiful, sunny late-winter days lying about and staring, from across the room, at the covers of the increasingly thick stack of New Yorker and Time Out magazines gathering moss on the dining table - at which, appropriately enough, I hadn't sat down to eat in the two months prior to having guests round for Sunday lunch in February.

I reposed my way through this darker and colder than normal winter, tacitly squashing an ass dent in the cushion of my sofa so convincing that it still exists despite rearranging the couch bits more than a month ago. I did nothing all winter apart from write copy for clients for money, which I also managed to do from a prone position in the sofa dent.

I gained weight for the first winter since 2004, when I was still with my last long-term partner, who, in his attempt to be adoring, proclaimed the March me 'winter Frank.' Winter Frank returned this year with a record-tying body fat accumulation of something like five spanking new kilograms.

My 32-inch LCD television became one of my best friends, and the back stories of the characters of Frasier became more interesting than my own. My other friend was a dead git from Tennessee called Jack Daniels.

It's puzzling when a localised death creeps into your house and breathes its grey carbon dioxide into you. I still don't fully understand what motivation - or lack thereof - lead me to flop idly for three months as I watched my friends' careers accelerate. Even my friends in the performing arts moved a notch or two up the rickety ladders they've chosen to climb. But I got nowhere other than exactly where I'd been since October of last year, stuck in a silent neutral gear, not of despair or hopelessness, but clearly not of their opposites, either.

Absolutely. Nothing. Happened.

In New York in the middle of the 1990s, I fell in with a group of quasi-activist pseudo-philosophers who proclaimed themselves proponents of a 'New Humanism.' I parted ways with them after a year or so of being accused of 'weakness' for not vigorously proceeding through life with thought, feeling and action in alignment. I didn't feel the need to grandstand about my achievements, and I still don't. I may work in marketing, but I've never been terribly fond of selling myself. They took what they perceived to be my reticence for weakness, and I never forgave them for being such blockheads that they couldn't see that my way of cutting a subtle but progressive course through life was not weakness but individuality.

What I did take away from the experience was a simple truth that still makes absolute sense to me: there is no such thing as stasis in human life. There is only movement forward or backward, progression or retrogression. Only by ploughing on determinedly can life be considered to be moving forward, even if that determination leads one down paths that slam suddenly into unexpected dead ends. We generally refer to this as 'learning by trial and error.' Obviously, self harm and its negative-Nelly neighbours lead one backward. But what of the self-delusion of 'remaining the same?'

This, the New Humanists half preached to me, was akin to executing a self-harm regime against the soul, for each day that one remains in an apparent holding pattern, one learns only that tomorrow will be more or less the same as today. And when tomorrow's inner life can only be expected to yield the same result as today's, hope is expunged from the heart. Sustaining a stasis, therefore, leads only to spiritual death. Things cannot stay the way they are; or, in short, when we hold still too long, we die while living - or perhaps 'metabolising' is the better word.

(Clearly the winter weight gain signaled that I wasn't metabolising efficiently enough.)

And now, in the springtime of both season and soul, I turn to ask myself, 'What the fuck was that all about?' Why the sudden, sustained interest in next to nothing? Was it seasonal affective disorder? An exhaustion with life? A stretched out bad mood? An unnumbered chapter in the book of Mid-life Crises?

I think perhaps it was as simple as this: Left largely unchecked, and working alone at home, I forgot to get on with it. The days in London in winter are short. They end before 4pm. The tendency can be to hibernate, and it appears that I had done so. Perhaps the current phase of my career had reached its pinnacle, and it was time to try other ways of making money. But the winter came, and my cosy little flat turned into not just a sanctuary, but a bear cave with a leather sleeping area.

Or perhaps I'm underselling myself, as I've frequently done, to myself. I arranged a work area in the corner of my room, eventually, in order to clearly differentiate between 'home' and 'office.' I installed insulation around my doors and windows. I put up huge roller blinds to provide more privacy. But even these things pointed to a tendency towards self-isolation, to adopting a 'please leave me be' posture. Was it time, as the old REM song goes, that I had some time alone?

Living alone is wonderful, but it has its drawbacks, not the least of which is the lack of another human being in your house off which you can bounce ideas, thoughts and opinions. Or just someone who expects you to get up in the morning because they have to get up in the morning. Or a life form other than a plant to remind you that you simply must keep going, keep trying, keep creating.

I'm thawing nicely now, and ideas are beginning to flow again. In the final analysis, what probably happened was an unintended conspiracy of forces. I needed rejuvenating, and it wasn't springtime. I needed energy, and the sun wasn't shining. I needed strength to move off the sofa, but the gym was a mile down the road through the rain and cold. Did it all just stack up against me in a wall of bad timing and bad luck?

Whatever it was, it stands as a warning for next winter and a lesson I shall not soon forget. I mean, my god! I'm so fat!