What lucid state is this?

What lucid state is this?
You call it madness but you are solid still.

Forever searching for something, afresh anew, because there is tedium in knowledge. Predictability, how dull to have everything just so.

Excitement comes when holding your knees under your chin you hurl yourself into a sea of mystery.

And yet there is laziness too. Failing to finish what you started, tossing it aside because drawing all the threads together into a comfortable rounded solution is irksome. Far better wild expression?

And there is sadness in the familiar. Large ugly rocks shaken relentlessly shuffle to the top exposed, whilst excitement, the beautifully smooth sand sinks out of sight. The trains rattling juddering momentum drags on and you wonder. How did I end up here?

This changes everything

Gosh this really does change everything doesn’t it? No longer can I walk away from pain and distract myself with adventure. Right now I have to play the diplomat, right now I have to pretend to like people I don’t and be this strong hardened unemotional woman, it’s exhausting and I isn’t me.

A friend at college helped me transport my washing machine in the back of his van. I thanked him and offered to buy him some beer.

“No no its fine” he said “just happy to help”

This confuses me every time it happens, because it is a subtle untruth. He actually means “Yes some beer would be nice I like Stella” doesn’t he? But why doesn’t he say so? It’s a more than fare exchange and he would at least end up with the beer he likes best rather than me making a random choice.

This is where I go so wrong with men, or at least from my perspective, where they go so wrong with me.

“Do you like me?”

“Yes”

“Great”

“ Oh actually I didn’t mean that, I don’t want to be with you at all, I just wanted to sleep with you, but really you’re a lovely girl…..”

Being told you’re a ‘lovely girl’ by a guy is like a local community saying “Yes we think Nuclear power is certainly a clean, safe economical viable way to power our tellys without rapidly using up all the earths resources, we just don’t want it in our back yard”

I’m a nuclear power station, that’s what I am. My mum would be so proud.

People play games with language. They pretend to be something they are not. I often see people who are sensitive or shy or hurt pretending to be confident and strong to cover up the truth from the world. I say what’s so wrong with shyness or sensitivity or hurting? At least you have feelings. If people judge you for that and try and put you down then its they who are the morons, not you. Don’t try to be more of a bully than the bully; you simply become something worse than the thing you are trying to defeat.

I’m shy, I hate a stage, and I think that’s fine. I hurt too and I don’t mind telling you because I think everyone does and if people don’t admit to it then they are part of the conspiracy not the solution.

For your cycling pleasure

I have however come to realise what I so love about cycling over say, cars, trains, buses or motorbikes. Its the total experiance that you get from traversing the landscape. The effort of going up hill all day is not a thing you can forget. The top of the hill is something you have dreamed about and strived both mentaly and physicaly for. The ufforia of reaching the summit and apreciating its views is so amplified a car journey can not reward in the same way.

Cycling provides you with a physical feeling of a landscape, not just a visual one. Its more like running your hands over a mountain with your eyes closed. The landscape has a firm grip on your emotions and plays you like a puppet. Therefor you are emotionaly tied to a place and you remember it thus.

People are offten scornful of the cyclist. They assume you would rather be on a bus but for some reason, money or mear stupidity you are on a bike. These people I assume can not see beyond holiday snaps and ticking off destinations. I care for neither. I want only to travel and feel the world beneath me. I only wish I were braver.

Not a blog

This is not a travelers blog.
I will write retrospectivly about my journeys at a later date, maybe tomorrow maybe in a week. When I have managed to sort out the incidents of my time away and arranged them in a meaningful order.
At present all I have is a rather narrow and predictable tourist traveler experiances, a fish out of water, foriegner struggling with a language, an alien wondering around someone elses country occasionaly bumping into things. Taking photos, being bemused, bewildered and delighted by the difference. Wishing folk at home could be a little more calm, less angry and generally more mediteranian. Missing friends but in no way wanting to wake up from my soft and murky traveling dream where I drift from place to place without a care. Aware that a million people have been here before me. I break no seel, I have done nothing terriably extrodinary. The only thing that stands out as unusual is that I, me, Sarah have not been here before. Its rather like an arangement of lottery numbers. Each time the same numbers appear but its the first time my specific set have come up. To the outside observer its just another set of 6 numbers in a line.

Stories from over there

The Mafia

Few years ago, probably 2006 I was driving yet another Contiki Coach around Europe. It was a dodgy bus with a dodgy battery. Buses my friends are like people, it may be the same make as the last one with the same engine made in the same factory but it is distinctly individual and it has feelings! Buses are quite often, a tad neurotic, perhaps it’s the way they are used relentlessly all day and then abandoned at night. They hold a grudge, they save it up until a really opportune moment then they unleash hell.

I had an incredibly annoying Tour Manager on that tour. She was uber girly. I am not. She would flirt with her male drivers in order to get them to do what she wanted. I am a strait female. Her temperament was a lethal cocktail of chirpy, tasteless, immature and bouncy yet depressingly dull due to her constant jolly inane drivel. There is only so much of the Venga boys back catalogue I can listen to before I want to shoot myself. We didn’t get on.

This day was a particularly bad day out of a distressingly awful tour.

It was a tight day for timings, even if everything goes to plan, its still a very tight day. The itinerary went something like: Leave Rome oh say 7am, drive to Pompeii, (aprox 4 hours drive) 2 hours for lunch and tour of ruins. Depart around 1pm, drive down to Brindisi (5 hours including stop) arriving no later than 6pm for check in for night boat to Corfu. Missing the boat is of course not an option because finding a hotel for 52 people in the middle of summer is a problem. Booking them on to a boat for the next day would be impossible. Plus you would have 50 very unimpressed tourists on your hands and you don’t want that. No you don’t

Grand. No problems. Tight but definitely ‘do able’.

So we leave Rome and hit the highway. About an hour on the road we meet a traffic jam, a really big one, a monster. We moved about 10 meters in an hour. The mafia had shut the road, the main road, the really big one that every one heading south drives down. Eventually we came to an exit. We are forced off by dudes in black shiny cars and sharp suits who are parked across the highway. I didn’t know where this side road went. I don’t do GPS. I know my way around, GPS’s are for wimps.

It was funny in a perverse way, we had an American lad on board whose sole reason for booking this trip was to see Pompeii. I feared he may only see a sign from the motorway If indeed we ever found the motorway again, and we would have a lawsuit on our hands. Just as we turned off the exit, the suits reopened the road. We had lost 2 hours. I did a highly illegal 3 point turn in my 12 meter bus in the midst of a mental Italian traffic chaos and we got back on the autostrada. Finally we were moving and we had no time to loose….

It was about then that my tour manager thought it a good point to check the ferry ticket. Most TMs check it the night before, you know, to see what time the boat leaves, this one was trusting it to luck. We were lucky. We didn’t have to be at the ferry port till 7pm, not the typical 6. We had gained an hour, the yank would see Pompeii after all, although it would be at a jog. 1 Hour for Pompeii visit, lunch on the bus, we were still going to make it, it was going to be ok…

I had parked up the coach in the small coach park run by the mafia. We had to park there, operations for Contiki in Italy were arranged by the mafia. Every other country in Europe we could do as we pleased. But here things were a little different. I mentioned I had a dodgy battery. Well it had been fine so far, I had been nursing it along now for about 12 days all along our journey from London through Paris, Lyon, Barcelona, Nice, Venice, Florence and Rome. So long as when you left it sitting, you remembered to switch everything off including (vitally) the Master Switch. The master of all switches that controls the power supply to everything, well as long as you did that, you remembered to switch off the Master Switch, it would start fine….

I return to the coach park after an hour’s lunch in Pompeii to find I’d left the master switch on, what can I say? it had been a stressful morning. So I turn the key and nothing happens just a pitiful pathetic whirl. “Ok” say I, “we are going to have to push start the bus”. There were many doubters on the coach. Can you really push start a bus? I didn’t know either, I’d never done it before. I’d never even push started a car, but I thought that, right now I’d give it a shot. Now Coaches are big and heavy but luckily I just so happened to have my rent a mob crowd to push me. So there I am in the drivers seat, the coach park is about 20 meters square and across the way from me is a large wall. I put my foot on the clutch I put it in gear, the large gang of kids behind me pushed. We rolled, I yanked my foot off the clutch and the beast spluttered into life. I braked suddenly before I hit the wall. We were away. But we had lost yet more time.

We had to make the boat. It should take 5 hours with a wee stop, we needed to be there in 4. I drove like the wind. The roads around Solerno near the Amalfi Coast are windy and narrow. When you pass a lorry there are inches in it. We didn’t stop for a break. Yes there were dissenters but what could I do. The last part of the journey we are in total Mafia territory. There is a stretch of road that leads along the coast after Bari that is patrolled, not by police, but dudes in green trucks. It’s a fast road, like any other Autostrada but coaches are restricted to 80 km. If we were going to get to the ferry port on time I was going to have to do the max of 100 km. It was a risk because if we got stopped we could waste more time bribing some mafia fella, but if we didn’t speed we would be late and miss the ferry. My heart was in my mouth but we were lucky. We swept into the ferry port a little after 7pm. We made it, just.

Beer was going to taste sweet tonight….

The boat wasn’t there, it was late, we waited another 2 hours on the dock.

But that’s life right?

Ash Cloud Permitting

I want to get away. I want to do something extraordinary, but I don’t seek attention. I do it for myself, besides most folk don’t care anyway. I do want to be appreciated. I do want people to respect me.

I don’t think that they do. I don’t know why.

I often wonder why people ignore me. It’s not depressing, it’s just puzzling. Why if I’m sitting on my own do other people sit elsewhere? Perhaps its because I’m not a member of a gang, I despise national identity, I feel it, but think of it a weakness. Taking life on solo is so hard, but admirable. I respect those that tackle loneliness and fight it head on. I have no choice.

A friend said recently, people think you’re strange for doing things on your own, yet they won’t come with you. So what choice do you have?

Sit at home feeling sorry for your self? No not for me. Changing and trying to be more like them? No, that wouldn’t do either.

I’m doing a long bike ride, far far longer than I have ever been before in a single direction on my own. It will be a huge mental challenge, If I can make it, it will be determination and stubbornness that drives me. I will fight loneliness, there will be no routine, ill have to adapt and ill have to talk to strangers. All of which scares me, but I crave it.

I want to win.

Women!

The tricky thing about being female is how other people treat you.

When I was a little girl I didn’t realise there was a difference between boys and girls.

I’m not sure my opinions have changed all that much. I think its society that pressurises each of us (boys and girls) into behaving in a certain way, subtly influencing us by pushing images and fake ideals at us. It’s all been going on a long time; the myth perpetuates itself, it’s so deeply imbedded in our psyche. It’s almost totalitarianism in nature.

For example if you’re a boy and at school one day you cry, because someone has stolen your books or has stood on your favourite toy all the other boys will laugh at you and ridicule you. Will you cry again? No. You shape your opinions of yourself by how other people react to you. But what if we had no heavy-handed influences? How would you see yourself then? Or what if the influences were different. 13 years ago I was in Thailand. I met two friendly Thai guys who gave me a guided tour of the surrounding areas of Chang Mai on the back of their bike. We went to a temple on top of a very steep hill in the rainforest, we boiled eggs in a hot spring, then we ate at a small restaurant consisting of a bit of lean to corrugated iron and some small plastic garden chairs, shunted up against the side of a dirt track road. We were in the middle of nowhere. The waiter sashayed over to take our order. He was a ladyboy, the two men I was with spoke to him and he sashayed away again. They explained to me what he was, but were completely inoffensive in their description. They were ordinary guys and so was the waiter.

Gender, in my opinion is a sliding scale, female one end, male at the other and a great deal of people wondering around in the middle. It’s where I would place myself.

Of course there are differences between men and women (its all about hormones). Men have more self confidence. This is probably because it is generally assumed within society that men are more able than women. Men receive more respect, as standard from people, both men and women. Assertive women are seen to be bitches or bolshie and unfeminine. Assertive men tend to gain respect and authority.

Women are more emotional and require affection, all the time!. It’s not a needy thing it’s just normal. Men tend not to require as much and get a little nervous when encountering ‘emotional’ women.

My parents used to make hay each year and as the youngest and weakest I was given the job of driver. So at about 12, when I was tall enough to reach the peddles, I was driving a Land Rover with a 40 ft trailer, stacked high with hay as my parents threw the bails onto the back. I became a good driver because it was always my job and nobody told me that I couldn’t do it.

I have driven buses and coaches for 13 years and I have countless examples of how people treat me differently, because of my gender.

I am a confident driver with a lot of experience. At the age of 19 I became a London bus driver. I moved to Scotland and drove tours there, I was forced to take unsuitable single-track roads, squeeze the coach onto ferries, drive up drives to country houses completely unprepared for a 12 metre coach and negotiate small humpback bridges. I then drove and guided for a small backpacker company for a short while before training to drive tours throughout Europe. I drove in most of the major towns of Europe and not just once or twice, I did it continuously for 3 years. I drove most frequently in Paris, Rome, Florence, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Barcelona and Amsterdam. But I have also driven through Poland Belarus, Greece, (including Athens) Albania, Croatia, Slovakia, Montenegro, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. I even drove through and navigated my way around Russia, driving around St Petersburg and Moscow. One of the worst, or should I say challenging places I have ever driven. Now there are people I know who have done a great deal more. I have a female friend who drove a coach through Iran. I want to explain all this not because I’m showing off. I need to tell you all this so I have you on side when I tell you my next story.

When you are a female bus/coach driver people treat you like you’re 5. They lower their voice, sink their head into their shoulders and look you in the eye and say. “Well aren’t you clever”

“Wow can you really drive this?” (Always seemed a ridicules question to me.)

Then when you get going and you have driven them around a bit…. “Wow you are actually really good”

Actually.

There is no reason that a person who has 13 years bus driving experience shouldn’t actually be able to do her job. Yet that’s what people assume. They assume you haven’t been doing it for long, you are going to be shit and you will get into an emotional fragile flap any time soon. It’s these assumptions that you have to fight against. Sometimes people aren’t so nice, sometimes people are intimidated or affronted by you and it comes out as anger or spite. This reaction is self-perpetuating. Self-confidence comes, not just from your own abilities, but other people’s confidence in you. Imagine standing on stage and trying to be funny when the audience shouting and jeering at you. It’s not impossible but certainly it would require a great deal of front.

A few months ago an old man got on my bus in Edinburgh. He gave me a knowing look as he got on and a cheeky smile. As he alighted a dozen bus stops later he said “wow you drive just like a man” This was supposed to be some kind of compliment. I said “oh no did I hit someone” But he didn’t get it. It was an equally sexist reply but he started it!

I have managed to do what I have done because I had a great upbringing and I am very stubborn and determined. I’ve done it because enough people have believed in me.

Now want to be a Sculptor.