Untitled (Motorcycle: before sunrise). Caen, France, 2023.
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When we seek our own birthright gifts, it is important not to equate them with the techniques our society names as skills. Our gifts may be as simple as a real interest in other people, a quiet and caring manner, an eye for beauty, a love of rhythm and sound. But in those simple personal gifts the seeds of vocation are often found, if we are willing to do the inner and outer work necessary to cultivate our mastery.1 P. Palmer.
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Flashback: October 2023. A Saturday.
I’m on a blustery French dockside, before dawn in intermittent rain on a Saturday, having just circumnavigated ‘la Fete de la coquille’ in Ouistreham. I had just spent 2 weeks feeling, of being, completely free: answerable to no-one for what felt like the first time in my adult life, aged 67. Yesterday I’d done over 400 miles on my bike, mostly in the pissing rain which defeated my Dianese textile suit, necessitating stops for veloute de tomate from vending machines which said ‘not foreign cards’ but worked anyway (sorry!); buying extra clothing; even then nearly giving up short of Caen.
The rain stopped. I did find my—unusually for me pre-booked—hotel, in the rush hour. And I did get a steak—albeit on a table next to a bunch of English golf-bores-on-tour.
Two weeks, and a lifetime, ago I had left Yosser back at his old home and forayed, still a bit frayed, into Europe. My first time over the water since the trip to Bled in 2016: the year of the Brexit catastrophe. The year too when Direct-Debit Debbie the toxic lawyer was prevailing over-much: deranged re-arranger of our lives.
Other derangements had cropped up also: A pandemic, the bungled response by ‘our’ ‘government’, casting even the Brexitastrophe into the shade; An interminable series of submissions for my doctorate—locked in conflict with an external examiner; Driving trucks through the health-fallout of both of these events—thereby contracting long Covid and post doctoral burnout simultaneously; The deaths of both parents—my father, as he was finally beaten into gory submission by dementia. Then, a week after my father’s death, sustaining a life changing injury myself in a motorcycle accident.
No wonder Yosser had been beginning to lose patience with me. At least, thanks to my parents, for the first time in over 10 years we were no longer broke. Or under the cosh for the first time in 15 years. Or 50, if you count when I left school, for good, just before my 16th birthday.
Today, as I did in truck driving days a couple of years—feels like decades—ago I had managed to get up at 5am. And I’m here, nearly at the end of a 2000 mile, purgatory, motorcycle road-trip. Did I say purgatory, as in suffering? Au contraire, I was in heaven. I still am.
Reflecting on this, week, now a year, after making a snap of my bike on dockside in Northern France. I process both journeys (life; the road trip by motorcycle). I re-process, up-cycle, derangements: into depannage—a fixing, a feeling of becoming repaired, awakened.
The trip had—viscerally—dissolved various traumas: grief, homelessness, separations, injuries, illnesses. It may even have been life changing, purgatory—I may need to return, move south.2,3 My main dilemma now being, how to break the news to Yosser?
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Untitled (Yosser). Lingen, 2023.
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Notes:
Palmer, P. (1990; 68) The active life: A spirituality of work, creativity and caring. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
purgatory | ˈpəːɡət(ə)ri |noun (plural purgatories) (often Purgatory) (in Catholic doctrine) a place or state of suffering inhabited by the souls of sinners who are expiating their sins before going to heaven. [mass noun] Mental anguish or suffering. adjective archaic having the quality of cleansing or purifying: infernal punishments are purgatory and medicinal. ORIGIN: Middle English: from Anglo-Norman French purgatorie or medieval Latin purgatorium, neuter (used as a noun) of late Latin purgatorius ‘purifying’, from the verb purgare (see purge).
derange | dɪˈreɪn(d)ʒ |verb [with object] Make (someone) insane. Cause (something) to act irregularly: stress deranges the immune system. Archaic: intrude on; disturb. DERIVATIVES derangement | dɪˈreɪn(d)ʒm(ə)nt | noun ORIGIN late 18th century: from French déranger, from Old French desrengier, literally ‘move from orderly rows’.