We've completed two six hour journeys on India's amazing railway system now, from Jaisalmer to Jodhpur and now Jodhpur to Jaipur.  Both times we travelled air-conditioned class, which seems to be like the equivalent of business class on a plane, although the networks "sleeper" and "second' classes might be better described as "steerage" rather than "economy".  Our first journey was delayed by around an hour and our second by three and a half.  No explanations are offered for these seemingly "normal" problems. The first thing that struck me on entering Jodhpur Station for our second journey was just how strangely hermetic the system is.  Outside the streets are covered in shit, but once through the threshold of Jodhpur Station the platform is clean and glistening from constant washing and sweeping.  Overall, the railway network offers an illusion of timeless order in a World of disorder and confusion.  It has its own police ...

After our first experience of Indian Railways we arrived in Jodhpur on Christmas Eve.  Our hotel, the Haveli Inn Pal and its smarter sister Pal Haveli, seem to be something of a Jodhpur institution and are well placed in the old city near the main market and Victorian clocktower and immediately below the looming presence of the Mehrangarh Fort.  As you can see from the photo Jodhpur is called "the Blue City" for obvious reasons. On Christmas Day I went for a run through the streets of the old city, providing locals with some harmless amusement, before Sue and I scaled the heights leading to the Fort and did the tourist thing with our audio guides.  The scale of the fort is awesome, like something out of a fairytale or a fantasy novel and the decoration exquisite and well preserved.  Somehow the plummy Indian tones of the audio guide narrator sucking up to Jodhpur's royal family just added to the grandeur.  But like everywhere in this country the sheer...

We left the Secret House Hotel in Jaisalmer at 6.00am this morning in a battered tuk tuk for Jaisalmer Railway Station.  It was bumpy and chilly and we had to lean over the back seat to hold onto our luggage as there was no tailgate.  I was expecting chaos and in fact the station was fairly calm.  It turned out that our 6.45 train was coming from Jodphur where it was then scheduled to return at 12.45pm.  It wheezed slowly out of the gloom with a big headlight shining just before 7.00am and finally set off about 7.20. It’s our first Indian train and we travelled 3 a/c, which basically means compartments comprising eight berths, six in two tiers of three and one tier of two berths.  But, not being an overnight train the berths don’t appear to be allocated so the idea is the middle tier berths are folded down making room for everyone to sit on the lower berths.  Well maybe that’s the idea, but the reality is a bit more of a free for all.  But folks a...

We visited the largest of Jaisalmer's Jain temples today.  An ornate stone labyrinth pregnant with symbolism.  Like everywhere here it was packed with visitors snapping away on everything from battered smartphones with smashed screens to the latest digital slr cameras.  Snap, snap, snap we all went until in the end the temple dissolved for me into a series of photo opportunities and I forgot entirely to actually look and take in the things I was supposedly trying to capture.  I look down on the vacuous and self-absorbed fashion of taking selfies so that a distorted image of oneself becomes the star of one's own "B" movies, but am I any better? Maybe compulsive picture taking is just another facet of our worship of the individual and their "experience".  So, just as Jains come here to worship things I don't really understand, so I come to worship at the temple of experience, burning images onto an artificial retina to be shared or not at a later dat...

We arrived in Jaisalmer on Wednesday evening after an uneventful couple of flights and were met by a lad from our hotel who whisked us straight there in a taxi.  In some ways this felt like the real beginning of our holiday after orientation in Delhi and then a kind of duty call on Amritsar, because Sue has been friends with so many Sikhs over the years.  Our first full day was largely occupied by a trip to the Royal Palace, which has an excellent audio guide, although we had to struggle through the crowds.  The toilets are strategically placed at the end of the tour, which meant that after an urgent need to have a pee I had to fight my way back through the throng up and down narrow stone stairs. We have also been around one of the beautiful sandstone family mansions or "havelis" in similarly crowded conditions and apart from that have spent much of our time walking the narrow streets of the Fort and the surrounding city, where our small hotel is situated. ...

On the afternoon after our visit to the Golden Temple we went to the newly opened Partition Museum in the old town hall.  It doesn't have any grand artifacts to display, just a historical narrative illustrated with the recollections, photos and possessions of some of those affected. It's a very moving experience and an uncomfortable one for a Brit, given the British government's role in this tragedy, which may have led to the death of a million souls and the the displacement of millions more.  Having exploited India for all we were worth for a couple of centuries and creating the myth of the "white man's burden" to help us deal with our guilt, we happily dropped that burden like a stone as soon as it was politically and economically necessary to do so. Not only did we British use a "divide and rule" policy to exacerbate tensions between Hindus and Muslims thus increasing the pressure for a post-colonial partition, but the way we administered the...

The morning after we arrived in Amritsar we set off after breakfast armed with Google Maps.  I managed to get us completely lost as we strode through the narrow streets in the city centre, fortunately quiet at that time of day.  By a stroke of luck we ended up approaching the Temple from a rear entrance.  We left our shoes and socks with an attendant and then walked through a freezing foot bath after which I was given a lurid pink headscarf by a smiling Sikh, through and archway, down some steps and then wham, into the brilliant white and gold buildings of the temple complex under a beautiful blue sky. Thousands of Sikhs and other visitors filled the complex and in the presence of so much devotion I felt both moved and insecure, unsure how to behave and react.  We quickly found ourselves close to the queue for the Golden Temple itself and so shuffled along with the devout along the pier over the central lake or "tank", all the while the music and chanting com...

I'm sat in our hotel room waiting for a taxi on our last day in Delhi.  I've got tendonitis in one foot, explosive diarrhea and I'm physically and mentally exhausted.  We have met a lot of good people, like the lovely family with the delightful pink baby who insisted on including us in their family snaps on a tour of the Red Fort.  Some hostility and rudeness too, people on tubes and at breakfast who will openly discuss the odd foreigners next to them.  And everywhere desperate people trying to make a rupee or two who will tell you anything to gain your attention and your money.  The Red Fort was one of the highlights, the site is vast and the architecture exquisite.  Like on the metro and all public buildings there is security everywhere, although much of it seems more ritualistic than effective.  Summed up for me by this guard at the fort engrossed in his smartphone under the indifferent gaze of a sleepy dog. We did the usual tourist thing...

We set off from Newark in the snow on Monday morning and after twenty hours of travel landed in Delhi yesterday morning.  The first thing we noticed was the smokey smell, reminiscent of the London smogs of our childhood.  Then as we emerged through the barrier of bored men holding notices with people's names on, the dogs, barky and fractious, but not threatening.  A young man finally coalesced  from the sea of notices bearing my name and led us to a grey and stained concrete multi-storey, barely distinguishable through the smokey haze, where his battered saloon awaited us.   The drive to the hotel took an hour or so in a honking motorcade with bikes and scooters weaving between the cars and tuk tuks. Yesterday evening we met up with our friend Sarah and her colleague Lotte, who by an odd coincidence have been working here for the last three weeks.  Following Sarah as she weaved confidently through the middle of a crowded market with the help of G...

Sue and I got back to Puglia on 30th October with a list of jobs to get done before the winter, not the least of which was to harvest our olives.  Last year's harvest was one of the worst on record in this part of Puglia, mainly because the olive fly was especially bad, causing most of the olives to drop in high winds before they could be picked.  We had so few olives we didn't even bother to try. This year is much better for everyone, but due to very hot weather in the summer many of our trees still seem to have lost a lot of their crop and we had a struggle to find enough to make up a 200 kilo load to take to the mill.  In the end after three days of scrabbling around our land in the rain and the mud we loaded our old Fiat Punto with about 250 kilos and three days later returned to the frantoio to collect our stainless steel churn or "bidone" containing thirty odd litres of oil. In a good year and with better pruning and management of our trees we could ha...

We're indoors in our house in Contrada Papariello.  The doors are all shut and the house is in darkness with several fans moving the sluggish air around.  It's nearly midday and outside it's 40c, inside the thermometer sticks stubbornly at 30c, day and night.  Only a break in the weather can bring the temperature down.  The caper plant on our stone steps is thriving however on the odd teaspoon of water Sue feeds it.  It's now flowered, giving the plaster Easter Island figure a floral garland that has turned its tight-lipped expression into almost a grin. Yet again months have gone by since I last wrote in this blog.  I've been busy, but also not inclined to write for reasons I can't pin down. Flitting from the UK to Puglia we've now finished decorating and upgrading the flat in Newark.  Now all we need to do is put some furniture in it.  I've done quite a few baby namings and weddings in the UK and to my surprise I'm in demand in Italy too...

We met Carole and Kevin in about 2005 when we were still in the first flush of our Italian adventure and they were running a holiday letting business.  We've always associated them with Italy and were frequent visitors to their trullo complex in Puglia and later to their townhouse in Nocera Umbra, to which they returned after it had been renovated some thirteen years after the earthquake that rendered it uninhabitable in 1997. Now we all find ourselves back in the UK, at least temporarily, and so we went up to see them in Kevin's old home town of Newcastle.  Sue and I both feel at home with Carole and Kevin, in part perhaps because we have a shared sense of adventure and a willingness to do things rather than just dream about them. Although we met in a new context we quickly settled down into our easy friendship, strolling around Lindisfarne and Newcastle, chatting eating and drinking.  On the Friday night we found a Malaysian restaurant in the City Centre which...

The weekend before last we travelled up to Newcastle to see our old friends Carole and Kevin and found ourselves on an outing to Lindisfarne, the Holy Island.  It's the third time I'd been there and the memories of those earlier visits dogged my footsteps as we strolled around the island on a cold and unsettlingly bright winter day. The first time was in the early eighties with my ex-wife Rosemary for a camping holiday in our brand new little Fiat Panda.  Thinking back to the younger me I could hardly bear the thought that I am the same person.  I was so ignorant of myself and my peculiar preoccupations and Rosemary and I were, well, so young and so naive. The second time was in 1993, en route to the Edinburgh Festival with my friend Rob, his wife Vivian and my girlfriend at the time, Annabel.  I was just getting over divorce and a fucked up rebound relationship and was feeling full of myself, little knowing that within the week one of us would be dead in a...

Part of Sue and my experiment with retirement seems to involve impromptu outings.  Thus having a celebrants meeting near Wakefield Sue decided we should spend the weekend there and promptly booked us into the Holiday Inn Express in the city centre. In the event my meeting was cancelled but on Saturday we drove to Wakefield anyway.  At least I now know why it was never on my bucket list, although it would be worth going back to just for the delightful tapas bar we went to that evening. The highlight of our trip was a visit on Sunday to the National Coal Mining Museum, just outside the city.  It's actually located in an old coal mine and includes a guided tour underground.  This was especially resonant for me as reflections on his short time "down the pit" figured so strongly in dad's anecdotes about his past.  The tour helped make real just how dangerous, noisy and unpleasant mining work is and how a gas explosion is an ever present danger which requires co...