Looking up: the groove of a desperate prune

I have less than 5 seconds to hold your attention before you drift off to less challenging destinations.

Quick, let me put this to you:

You’re in a new car, or a hire car. Or perhaps you have just stolen a car. Or it could just be an old car you are driving while very drunk.

You pull into a gas/petrol station to fill up. As you approach the pumps, you realise you don’t know which side of the vehicle the petrol cap is located. What do you do….?

Are you aware that there’s a simple way to tell which side your car dresses without dislocating your neck trying to spot the petrol cap? Without winding down the window, without looking behind you, without even peering at the wing mirrors? If you know the answer, farewell. You are free to seek superior entertainment elsewhere. But if you don’t – ha! – hard luck, loser. Trapped like a rat in an upturned bucket. Tough shit — you’re sticking this out for another seven deadly minutes.

So. Where were we?

*****

Welcome to a special cut-out-n-keep collector’s edition of RunningCommentary.

Brainwashed loiterers will be aware that RunningCommentary has been off-air for a while. No one knows why. Not even me. Wish I could help, but I’ve refused to answer my own questions on the subject.

What a tempest of enthusiasm was blowing back there, around the turn of the year. It’s a miracle I made it back to safety, but here I am, twenty pounds heavier, glass of consoling Barolo in hand, fridge bursting with cheese and chips and chocolate and frozen Chicken Madras. This is much more like it.

My work shirts have tightened up nicely again. One belt has already split, with another getting stressed out. Bedtimes get ever later, leaving longer to languish in these self-induced symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s. The main reason I am writing this now is that it postpones the moment when I have to winch my arse off this groaning chair and mutter off to bed.

The real giveaway is the ironing board. If it doesn’t get put away, and if its primary purpose changes from personal grooming apparatus to shelf for unpaid bills, it’s a dead cert the wild border is coming into view.

*****

That was a few weeks ago. Not long afterwards, that boundary did at last appear, at the end of my long, lost weekend. I’d spent a sunny Sunday afternoon in a lakeside bar, feeling just a bit too pleased with myself, filling a notebook with faux insight, and planning some great piece of bullshit writing that would never be looked at again. After missing the last bus of the afternoon, but without enough alcohol in my veins  to anaesthetise the pain of a Swiss taxi fare,  I set off up the steep incline with nothing but Shanks’s pony for company.

It’s less than 2 kilometres of paved path. I’d done it many times before, but never had it felt as challenging as this. Twenty minutes on, panting like a steam train traversing the Furka Pass, I pull into my Strasse, close to the top. Here I feel an involuntary swoon, but not the pleasant sort experienced when tuning into Newsnight to find Emily Maitlis waiting for me. I’m coated in perspiration. Fumbling for the door key in these trousers that are even more shrink-wrapped than they were last week, I know the game is up. The inner sat-nav announces: “You have reached your destination”, and I know what that destination really is. It’s the edge of chaos, people; the undiscover’d country.

One is never quite alone on this map-free hike through the existential hinterland. The expedition this time had been quite a party, and yes, I spotted a few familiar faces ducking behind the scattered rocks.

But the time has come for another sort of party. Snap election. We need a new government in the upper chamber. Manifesto? Och – same as the last one and the one before that. It never fails. “Time for a change”. The most enduring slogan of the lot.

The switch of direction is assisted by things arriving in the mail: my insoles from the Zurich Sports Clinic; a ProStretch from the U.S. to help tease my calf muscles into shape (more of this excellent device in a later post); and an entry to the Greifenseelauf.

Even more helpful than the mail is acknowledging this simple equation, that no running means no writing, and it’s driving me nuts.

The orthotics were the output of another gait analysis session. It was much like the previous one in Maidenhead, just over two years ago, both in content and diagnosis. That should have been reassuring, but I considered being disappointed. The new guy had small, rimless spectacles on a chain, spoke with a brainy German accent and charged me twice as much, so I presumed he would discover the silver bullet lodged in a tendon, the removal of which would instantly make a thousand flowery sentences bloom.

But the medical profession stuck to its story. Overpronation it is. The earlier post,  about the Drummond Clinic visit, provides a description. Those polite enough to feign interest can read it there. The insoles on their own are not enough, but they are a weapon available for the mission ahead – should I choose to accept it.

Have I accepted it? Well, I’ve sent off my race entry, but that’s not the point. I’ve ‘accepted’ several races in the last 2 or 3 years but the withering tendons have not. We’ll see what happens this time, as another entry form is tossed on the darkening embers of my running career. Let’s see a flicker, please. The Greifenseelauf is a 10 and 21K mass-participation event in September, in Uster, over there, across the lake and beyond that mysterious hill, 20 kilometres from here as the red kite flies.

Progress so far? Thirty days without the triple-tongued treats of vino rosso, Lindt Milchnuss and Coop Prix Garantie Camembert — the greatest grocery bargain in Switzerland — and I’m starting to feel persuaded. It’s the usual low-crap diet. The fridge is swimmming in oily fish and blooming foliage.

The exercise ingredients are being slowly added. Two or three hours in the gym this week, and another trip today if I can dispose of this entry before sunset. It’s hard work, but sweat is its own reward. If I can produce enough of the sweet stuff to fill a cell in a spreadsheet, I’m happy.

*****

These changes made this page seem a possibility, but the decisive impetus came from elsewhere.

For 42 years I’ve scribbled in notebooks, but have rarely looked back to see what it is I’d felt the need to note. Too scared. But reinforced by all these essential fatty acids and vitamins, I reach for the current one and open it at random. Reading back through a few pages, I’m reminded of

• My favourite Shakespeare sonnet, which I was able to improve.
• Looking upwards at signs and things.
• An evening I promised myself I would forget — when a lifelong obsession disintegrated forever.
• The Zurich Writers Workshop (ZWW) weekend. With particular pain, I relive the instructions for writing good blog posts. I’ve been doing it all wrong.
• The hour before receiving this bad news, when I’d watched a lady bounding across Grossmunster Square on giant springs while I drank her coffee.
• Long Island Sound, and a rare hour of peace.
• Driving through Manhattan, Feelin’ Groovy.
• The 9/11 Memorial, and the storm of paper outside an 80th floor window.
• The simple method of locating the petrol cap on a car without looking for it.

And plenty more. All within a week or two. I thought I might talk some more about it.

*****

I’ll jump in here.

On almost any other weekend, I’d have devoured the opportunity to drive down to Geneva to meet up with the great @Sweder, in Der Schweiz on his annual work visit. I could, at last, have shut off one constantly dripping pipeline of yearning, by taking him to the HR Giger Museum bar.  But not this weekend.

Same thing happened last year, for the same reason. Something better change. Next year, the ZWW and the Vitafoods annual conference need to compare diaries.

Instead of heading off to the Giger, with its sensation of “being literally in the belly of a fossilized, prehistoric beast”, according to the cyber-blurb, I leave the apartment and lope down the sunny hillside to Horgen Bahnhof, grinning all the way. Despite being perversely early to be doing anything purposeful on a Saturday, here was the undeniable truth: I am feelin’ groovy. Still feelin’ groovy. Ever since the previous week, when we were cruising through Manhattan early on a sunny evening with three vacation days to burn.

Did I say cruising? The traffic on 3rd Avenue was static, but the live entertainment wasn’t. It was here that a sinewy, near-naked girl of about 19 appeared alongside me in the middle of the road, and started pole dancing — without a pole. After consulting my wife on the matter, it seemed she was inviting me to visit the local gentleman’s club. No thanks. Some other time, on some other planet.

A block further on, I glanced up to see a sign for 59^th Street, and an arrow marked Queensboro Bridge. Hot damn. Of course. The 59^th Street Bridge Song, or Feelin’ Groovy. For the past couple of days, ever since an earnest young guitar player sang a couple of their songs in a Jersey City bistro, I’d been humming Simon and Garfunkel. Things were starting to come together.

So a week and a half later, striding down the hill to the station, I’m still feelin’ groovy. When the Zürisee is as luminescently turquoise as it is today, and when the mountains are crowding the eastern skyline this clearly, their brilliant white spring overcoats sparkling in the sun, and when my destination is Zurich and the Zurich Writers Workshop, well… even that dog with two cocks would be looking pretty depressed by comparison.

No deeds to do, no promises to keep. The double-decker 08:04 follows the lakeside track all the way, through the string of small, self-confident towns and on into the heart of the city. Today I jump off at the elegant Enge, and onto the clanging tram to Niederdorf, where now I’m kickin’ down the cobblestones into the old part of town, lookin’ for Kirchgasse 13.

And here I am. But what’s this sign above the door? Ah, the venue was once the home of, er, Huldrych Zwingli. No, I hadn’t heard of the fellow either, but I learn that this big cheese in the Swiss Reformation lived here until 1531, when he was done in by the Catholics whose lives he was so keen to reform. Seems they got their retaliation in first.

A demi-millennium later, it’s the home of this year’s Zurich Writers Workshop. I look up at the etched sign, and wonder what another five hundred years will bring to this spot. All I see is my own absence rushing towards me.

I was here last year, except we were somewhere else and I don’t know where. As the gushing magazine articles will tell you, Zurich is a small city, but I haven’t wandered around it enough to know it well. Where did we stay in 2006, for instance, when I came here for the Zurich Marathon? A small hotel with boutiquey prétensions on a busy street, close to the apologetic expo and not far from the race start. But where was that? Somewhere grey and rainy over Wollishoffen way I think, by the lakeside. I recall the slight panic I felt on marathon morning, trying to navigate the undulating residential streets with a map disintegrating in the thick drizzle; and I remember reassuring an anxious German that Jens Lehmann was doing just fine at Arsenal, and would be in tip-top nick at the approaching World Cup. Though I doubt I used the expression “tip-top nick”.

It would be easy enough to do the research, and rediscover the streets and the route and the hotel. And in particular, that anaemic pizza place I ended up in after the race to make some notes for the race report. Here was my first experience of a Swiss Sunday, when everything but the hiking trail out of town is firmly geschlossen. The fear of beer deprivation created a worse panic than getting lost on the way to the start. After running a marathon, a fellow needs beer. It’s the law. So I glided around the city centre in an ever-widening circle of tram routes until I ended up back near the hotel, where at last, I found some seedy plastic sports bar with huge plasma TV screens and no customers. It wasn’t my usual hunting ground but I was desperate, and they were willing to sell me wheat beer and pizza. Lord, we are saved.

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

Through the ancient portal at Kirchgasse 13, and up the stairs. This time around we have Diccon Bewes, an ex-Lonely Planet travel writer who has found his niche as a quirky observer of Switzerland. I bought Swiss Watching shortly after arriving here in 2010, but confess that I haven’t quite completed it yet. Indeed I haven’t totally… started it. But he joins a pretty impressive list of writers bought-but-not-read in recent times, which should be some comfort to him.

Like last year, I join the non-fiction writers’ workshop. The labels are an administrative convenience, given that most non-fiction is fictitious.

So what do I learn? I learn that blog posts should be less than 500 words (gulp), should deal with just one topic (oh dear), should be written with a high degree of regularity (ahem), should be about the world rather than the writer (blushes) and worst of all, should go easy on superfluous, wanton, gratuitous, repetitive adjectives (slashes wrists). And if your reader isn’t suckered in within five seconds, you are fucked. I use that word safe in the knowledge that all the stupid bastards who might be offended buggered off, nay fucked off, many paragraphs ago.

I was wrong about Twitter too. I’m instructed that it’s a self-promotional tool, designed to monetize your personal brand, and not a cyber-conduit through which one natters with mates about the telly and the football. That last item — the football thing — is a blunder I won’t be repeating. Here’s why.

After day one was over, while my classmates were in Hiltl, chewing the vegetarian fat, I, er, was es-chewing it, instead darting home to watch Chelsea get the sporting rogering of their over-illuminated lives. But oh dear god. There’s many a slip twixt cup and script, and there certainly was that evening.

I’ve hit on a bizarre coping mechanism that other idiots might like to investigate. Before the previous weekend’s fixtures, in which my own team’s chances of avoiding relegation from the English Premier League were largely out of their hands, I realised I couldn’t face the usual audio backdrop of pre-programmed banalities from the TV pundits. The thought of my weals being splattered with their vinegary observations didn’t appeal. Hard to explain without sounding psychotic, but I needed to be able to witness the deeds, while remaining within immediate reach of an escape lever, should the worst happen i.e. relegation. My first thought was to leave the balcony door wide open, handily allowing me to leap to my death with the minimum of fumbling. But then I thought of all those unconsumed Bordeaux 2005s in the cellar, and reluctantly closed it again.

I needed to be able to quickly slip into an alternative existence, slickly escaping the dreadful truth and the attached uncertainties. What about some potent intravenous narcotic? Nah. I lacked the required needle skills, not to mention the required potent narcotic.

Then it came to me. I hastily created a 3-hour iTunes playlist consisting solely of Jimi Hendrix and Burt Bacharach classics. Just as the matches kicked off, I clamped the headphones on and hit the shuffle button. It was a remarkably effective analgesic. I watched the two key matches simultaneously on two PC monitors on the table in front of me, along with this high-volume audio cocktail — weeping, chaotic Hendrix and the snuggly narcosis of Bacharach. For good measure , I wrestled with a gorilla of an Amarone throughout. Oh, and I nearly forgot. The kicker, as the Americans like to say, was the hallucinatory dose of pretty savage New York jet-lag. Immersive yet dissociated chaos, and quite nice really. It worked the first time around. Could it work its black magic again for the Champions League Final?

Wait. Let’s deal with that jet lag first.

I’d arrived back in Zurich just a few hours before lighting the Hendrix-Bacharach touchpaper. It was good to be home, but 8 a.m. on a Sunday isn’t the best time to finish a long-haul flight. I’d had three intense days of work sandwiched by a day or two of lee-sure. And what a typically memorable sandwich it was.

The Hyatt Regency in Jersey City is surely one of the best hotels in the entire US for its location, directly across the Hudson from Manhattan. When someone else is paying, it seems even better. The iconic skyline, a shrine to Western liberal democracy at any time, has now embraced that status even more tightly. The two poignant additions look close to completion.

On the free Sunday afternoon before my working week began, we made it across the Hudson to gaze at Ground Zero and to visit the newly opened 9/11 Memorial and Gardens. It can’t have been easy, coming up with a design that checked all the right boxes while avoiding the traps, but they managed it.

The two black granite squares, sited in the footprint of the doomed towers, carry the names of all 2,600 people who died there on 11 September 2001. We fall in with the informal procession making its way around. The throng is largely silent. We dawdle. We look up at the nothing, at a great absence of life. And we peer into the hole, into a different kind of nothing – the nothing that consumed the great something. All we physically see is a permanent flow of water trickling into the mysterious dark shaft, towards an invisible and unexplained destination.

We walk a few steps more, gazing at the ground … and then we straighten up for a bit and look determinedly forward, exchanging small empathetic smiles and nods with strangers.

And then we look up at the sky again; expecting to see the great nothing, but this time seeing a million tons of steel and concrete and thousands of disintegrating lives tumbling towards us. We blink again, and it’s back: nothing but the vacuum. What happened? Did you hear me? I said: what the fuck happened here? It’s a question you ask and re-ask as you look up and down and up again. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

I’m reminded of those lines from the opening part of The Waste Land.

So many.
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

So many present here today, yet such a sense of people missing. Here and there, folk stop and trace fingers around the etched names. It’s the nearest strangers can come to offering comfort. The names are so deeply carved, they can be decorated with flags, or contain crumbling notes that will speak of love and loss and things I will try, some days later, to understand with Sonnet 116. The day after I read it again, I heard it being read by Judi Dench on the Today programme. Yes, things were coming together.

The 9/11 Memorial is not an easy place to visit, and nor should it be. Among the hundreds of strangers allowed in on 30-minute timed tickets with you, there is a strong sense that we are all dealing with the same conflict – a noble refusal to ‘enjoy’ the visit but the need to come away from there with a sense of serenity and hope, and the desire to congratulate someone for the respectful way that such a wretched location has been reinvented. As experiences go, the 9/11 Memorial is a very big beast.

The antidote is a silent walk up to Shake Shack at Battery Park to tease that other reality back into the bloodstream. Then we find The Path, and slip back beneath the Hudson to Jersey City.

On the Wednesday, I was free from my work duties. We (M had flown over to join me) hired a disobedient Ford Focus in Jersey City, and headed out through Manhattan to Long Island.

All I know about the peninsula is the Gatsby-style reputation of the Hamptons. And it does have a cosy, rustic English feel that one imagines concealing an inglorious past. It’s not just the comforting names (Suffolk, Bridgehampton, Hither Woods…) and the cottagey residences with their twee topiary and neat paths through the rose gardens, but the empty wind-blown quality of Dune Road, the long coastal ribbon that draws you away from the rules of the city and towards the vast empty ocean where no one can see what you are doing, or what is being done to you. He may have been fictional, but his world was not, and the trip helps you understand the Gatsby mores just a little better.

Good accommodation isn’t easy to find on Long Island. That first night we stopped late, exhausted, at an unloved motel with stained carpets, a sticky TV remote and no wardrobe. From the Jersey City Hyatt to this. It’s what happens when you suddenly have to pay your own expenses. We dined in our motel room that night on donuts, crisps and Hershey’s chocolate from the local 7-Eleven.

The next day, we drove until we could drive no further. “Next stop Tipperary”, as the hotel owner put it. Montauk is the very last place you can get to, and possibly one of the very last places you would want to get to. It’s one of those windblown places that shrivels without visitors.

Most of the hotels and eateries in Montauk were still shut for the season, so we were grateful to find one place open — a creaking, two-storey, gale-battered, wooden hut of a hotel with an external staircase opposite the closed-up marina. But it was better than the previous night’s motel – and the restaurant right next door served fish and chips and draft Blue Point beer. For an Englishman starved of such delicacies for 6 months, this dish was never going to fail. And for only $10, it didn’t.

We had the restaurant to ourselves – almost. A couple of Australian girls sat whispering at the bar, while we headed for the big window. Come summer, this would be prime territory. Now it was nobody’s. Draining the second of my beers, I looked up at the Union Jack flapping furiously on the jerking pole, on the other side of the empty street. Beyond it, the vast grey Atlantic, its biggest waves catching the odd crimson fringe from the setting sun that glowed behind us.

Next day we wound our way back inland and across to Port Jefferson, a barely-twitching fossil of a town that felt like out-of-season 1950s Margate. Here we took the ferry across Long Island Sound to Bridgeport, Connecticut. In the middle of the Sound, sitting up on deck in the warm bright sun, disconnected from work and from WiFi and phone signal, the words “free at last” blew through my thoughts. According to my notebook, I spent much of the ferry trip mulling over the story my colleague told me over dinner a few nights earlier.

He works in a building directly across the Hudson from the doomed World Trade Center, and watched 9/11 happen live — and not just live on TV, like me. His own tale is fascinating, but it was the story of his sister that gripped me even more. She worked high up in the South Tower, just above the point where the second plane hit. As he watched the impact, he knew she must be dead, or about to die. He spent his desolate day calling her, but of course the calls were never answered. It was only later on that he learnt the full story.

She had worked in the South Tower for years. After the abortive 1993 truck bomb at the North Tower, she’d been sent on a security course designed to keep her alert for future incidents. On the morning of September 11, she was busy at her desk when a colleague stopped nearby, pointed at the window, and gasped. Looking up, she was astonished to see a bizarre paper storm in progress. Thousands of documents were fluttering past her window on floor eighty-something. As other workmates started to gather, chuckling, she recalled her training, and got to her feet, ordering everyone to leave their desks immediately and get out of the building. Amid groans and protests, she led them out of the office and down the elevator. As they emerged into the street and realised for the first time that something chaotic was happening at the North tower, they heard a terrible mechanical wail, and looked up just in time to see the second airline banking across the sky and vanishing into the floors immediately below the office they had just left.

I told this story to Sarah and Jena over paper platefuls of Thai curry at lunch on the first day of the ZWW. Sarah talked about her recent stay at a Californian ashram, where her taciturn room-mate had finally opened up to her over the week, revealing herself to be a 9/11 widow. Still inconsolable; still seeking some sort of peace.

Jena made a reference to the 9/11 “cover-up”, which produced an exasperated response from me. I’m not an advocate of this line of thinking. It astonishes me that so many people, especially in the U.S., believe the attacks were the result of official U.S. collusion. Call me naive. Call me gullible. Accuse me of being too accepting of what I read in the papers. Tell me I have too simplistic an understanding of international politics, and that my judgment of human nature is deeply flawed. And I will tell you that by remarkable coincidence, these are precisely the words I would use to describe the believers in 9/11 conspiracy. With unintended irony, they call themselves the Truthers.

These two ladies were interesting. Sarah, my instincts tell me, is a serious writer, and not a fantasist like the rest of us. Jena is a hand expert, who tried to persuade me she could make my hands change size and colour at will. She then proceeded to demonstrate it, though curiously, she could see it “clear as you like” and I could not. Which might explain our differing take on the 9/11 ‘truth’.

The workshop group included a chap who had just completed the Marathon Des Sables. I wonder if he managed to beat the extreme ironing participant. Paul writes a running blog (now there’s an idea) that he keeps… here.

Not surprisingly, there were quite a few bloggers in the class, and it was in this part of the discussion that I learnt that my RunningCommentary posts need a desperate prune. (I have that phrase written in my notebook: “desperate prune”, but I genuinely don’t know if it was an instruction to myself to write shorter blog posts, or a self-deprecating comment about my presence in the youthful class. At least I wasn’t the only male, like last year.)

Hearing what other people thought blogs were for is an eye-opener. After receiving the crushing news alluded to earlier, that blog posts should be less than 500 words, deal with just one topic, written frequently, blah… I was able to work out what I’ve been doing wrong all these years — which is to think that I keep a blog. From now on I will revert to the terminology of the distant days before the blog revolution. RunningCommentary is once again a writing project, and not a blog. Man, that feels better.

So, anyway, let’s not forget, we are some hours after the sombre Thai lunch, and I’m strapping the armchair to my inflated arse and installing massive fuck-off headphones around my ears, hoping that the formula that worked so well the previous Sunday will carry me through another critical match. Beside me are essential provisions for the journey: a plateful of Gorgonzola, olives and crackers, and a newly opened bottle of upscale Chianti. Ready? Let’s hit the big red button and dive into that Hendrix-Bacharach vortex. Here, as I have proved, all is possible. Hang onto your prejudices people, we’re on our way. Ya ha!!!

But the egregious neighbours from SW3 don’t play the game. What seemed like a long time after the optimistic kick-off, without a drop of Antinori’s finest left to lubricate the descent into Hell, the monstrous Drogba strikes the winning penalty. It’s like a poisoned dart fired deep into my guts. Driven so hard that there can be no stomach left for football. The appetite can surely never return.

As the spirits threaten the full crumple with Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, Hendrix comes to the rescue with Third Stone from the Sun. Oh people, here is 1967 speaking to me at last. I first heard this shocking, mysterious sound when I was a young boy. I didn’t understand it then, but I knew that one day I would need it. Today, finally, its time came, though I nearly didn’t give it the chance. Forty-five seconds. That’s how long you have to wait to reach the great, world-saving theme. Could I last that long? Or should I throw the shuffle dice and risk getting hit with “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”? 

I stick with the devil I know. Volume up a further notch, TV off. I shut my eyes shut on a nightmare world where Chelsea are Champions League winners, and open them again at 4 a.m., knowing that there can be no objective real world. And if there is no objective real world, I can have any damn Champions League winners I want. Thank you, Jimi Hendrix.

Five weary hours later I’m sitting outside a tiny polished-wood bistro alongside Grossmunster, gawping at Jena bounding along the steeply inclined cobbled street on her Kangoo Jumps. I’m so shocked, I drink her coffee by mistake. It’s all too surreal.

The workshop continues its journey through travel writing. I don’t learn much. Not because it’s bad, but because I am never well-behaved at these things. I might benefit more if I played the game. We do an exercise in pairs in which we each choose a famous place and write about its five most celebrated features. After a few nervous minutes of scribbling, my partner looks up and says: “OK, tell me the five most famous things about Montreal, and I’ll tell you if they match mine.”

“Montreal?” Oh dear. “Erm, well I know only one thing about Montreal. No hang on — two. Wasn’t it Montreal where the bloke who shouted ‘Judas’ at Bob Dylan in the 1966 Albert Hall concert was traced to by Andy Kershaw?”

“Pardon?”

“Er, okay, I know only one thing about Montreal.”

“Which is…?”

“Olympics? Nineteen seventy six? So… there must be a stadium…. of some kind?”

“Uh? Oh yeah, the Olympics. I didn’t have that one.”

I feel bad that I know so little about her home city. She says: “Let’s do yours instead.”

“Okay. Tell me the five most famous features of… Basingstoke.”

There’s a brief, puzzled silence. “Hazey what? What the hell is that?”

The exercise wasn’t a great success. (And anyway, it was a trick question. Basingstoke has only two truly world famous features, of course — the Anvil Shopping Centre and that big roundabout next to Tesco, on the Ring Road.)

Another exercise takes us on a field trip, down the stairs and into the cathedral next door. Here we must find a spot and, well, write something. With my nihilism goggles in place, I sit in front of a massive pillar that blocks my view of the altar, and the lovely Giacometti window. I write some old guff about choosing the monolith over the stained glass, in order to confront one’s own works rather than someone else’s. A blank pillar to represent my contribution to world literature is an idiosyncratic little personal joke.

I can’t write anything witty or insightful in ten minutes, though some people can. Back in the class, several classmates are eager to read out their irritatingly good paragraphs. Bastards.

Last year’s event, with the formidable Susan Jane Gilman, was quite different. For my particular needs, her format probably worked better, which required us to submit pieces in advance, for collective discussion. I sent in a version of my Boston Marathon report, along with an arbitrary chunk of the lesser-spotted running book to give it a bit of context. She chose the latter to distribute, which left me mortified, though people were still kind about it. But that’s a footnote. I liked that approach as it suits my style better, though other people I spoke to favoured Diccon’s more relaxed format.

The important thing is that it’s not important. I don’t go to events like this to learn anything about writing. Hell no. Nothing anyone tells me makes a dent anymore. I’ve read it all before. Heard it. Again and again. The stuff no one has taught me, I’ve worked out for myself. My problem is not that I don’t know how to do it, or when to do it, or why. Dammit, I’ll throw in the what and the where, while I’m up here on this journalistic shelf. It’s not even that I can’t do it. The problem is that I don’t do it.

Sometimes people find a way of speaking the truth more memorably, like Susan Gilman’s “ass in chair” rule. I welcome these serendipitous surprises, but they are not the reason for being there. I go because I like to be with people who write, and I suppose — like the source of the calf injury — I’m hoping to learn something new that will excuse me having to confront the uncomfortable truth, and therefore the uncomfortable remedy.

Did I learn anything about travel writing at the ZWW 2012? Is travel writing so different from any other form of non-fiction? It’s surely the same dear old bullshit, but with less chance of getting sued or challenged.

In terms of raw material for writing, I see little difference between trekking at altitude in Yunnan Province, along the Tibetan border, and sitting on the 07:56 from Huddersfield to Wakefield, watching an old man tip his cap as we pass the closed-up colliery. I remember having this very thought while… sitting on the 07:56 from Huddersfield to Wakefield, watching an old man tip his cap as we passed the closed-up colliery, one day in January 1994, two or three days after I had been… trekking at altitude in Yunnan Province, along the Tibetan border. It’s all in the same notebook somewhere — probably in that old suitcase under the stairs.

One’s life is the only journey that matters; love and kindness the only language and currency required. All else is just decoration. With these eyes, everything and everywhere becomes an adventure. Just choose to make it so. It’s something I’ve known since reading Down And Out In Paris And London, back whenever. That book had a profound impact on my world view when I was a kid. My first ever Almeria race report in February 2005 talks about it. I was reminded of this entry not long ago, and re-read it for the first time in a while. Writing it helped to explain this to myself, and re-reading it was a vital reminder.

Tugging this thought into a more abstract dimension, do you even have to travel to be enjoyed as a travel writer? The publishing trade won’t give it this label, but isn’t it up to the reader to decide whether there is enough of that sense of exploration, of confronting the unfamiliar, to consider something to be travel?

These flashcard thoughts pop up, then vanish, as I sit squinting in the bright sunshine, at a bar next to Horgen Station. The longer first leg back along the lake has been completed, and now I sit waiting for the bus to haul me back up the hill to my lair. It’s just an hour or so since the end of the meeting, and I’m still enjoying the afterglow. Fatigue, but a pleasant, almost post-coital fatigue. This isn’t intellectual exhaustion, but 4 a.m. Jimi Hendrix and Chianti exhaustion.

Revival costs just two mouthfuls of Weissbier and a cudgel of sunshine. Being a Sunday afternoon helps. Add in those mountains up there, and the serenity of the yachts bobbing past on the lake, and all seems in place. We are ready for something — but what?

It’s in these blissful moments of perceived enlightenment that all good things start to come together. Suddenly there is much to think about, and I realise I needn’t have waited all this time to work it out. Of course. The answer was there all along, if only I’d looked upwards, and grabbed the chance to see it right away. A bit like the picture of the fuel gauge at the top of the page, with the arrow clearly pointing to the side the petrol cap is located — sometimes the answer is staring at you right from the start.

And now, my Great Idea descends, the one that will shake the very cultural foundations of Switzerland. This is how I’ve described it in my notebook. Tragically, despite the build-up…. I omit to state what the actual idea is. Or was. It has gone forever, lost in the tornado of excitement that hits me as my bus comes into distant view. I wave to the waitress to bring me the bill. She returns, not with the bill, but with another glass of beer.

Och, what the hell? I sit down again and close my eyes, reliving that Long Island Sound moment in the sunshine. I hope I am grinning. It feels as if I am. Let the morningtime drop all its petals on me.  The next Great Idea, like the next bus, will be along in a little while.

If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, and no man ever grooved.