Politician: Mercenary available for hire to the highest
bidder.
Capitalism:
1) A small minority of mindless extremists ruining things
for everyone else.
2) An economic system which allows for paedophiles to run primary
schools and other groups with dubious motives to be involved in areas for which
they are least suited (see also: rail firms, oil companies, the arms industry
and banking).
3) The process of funnelling capital and resources away from
the poorest towards the richest.
Patriotism: Pride felt at being randomly born inside one
amorphous tax zone rather than another.
Tradition:
1) A profound lack of imagination.
2) A state of stagnation arising from a lack of new ideas.
U2: Any musical or artistic composition which produces a neutral
effect upon its audience.
Bono:
1) Anyone who is all talk and no action.
2) Anyone easy impressed by wealth and influence.
Awards Ceremony: The massaging of damaged egos.
Evil: The condition of being on the opposite site to established
order. Any atrocity can be forgiven if you offer the spoils to the right people
(see also: terrorist/freedom fighter).
Novel: A book that has nothing novel about it.
Astrology: The arrogant belief that 100 billion stars in 100
billion galaxies exist merely to tell you whether it’s a good time or not to
take up a new career opportunity.
Ah, Venice. What a
strange few days of my life. Already been to Dublin and London on this trip and
by the time I land in Venice, I am virtually skint. Thankful to find a decent
supermarket with cheap meat and cheap wine.
My first time in
Italy. It’s thunderstorm season and the plane circles the airport for half an
hour waiting for conditions to improve, which the pilot explains on landing are
the worst he’s experienced in twenty years of flying.
It’s already ten
o’clock in the evening and I’m panicking that I won’t be able to get into my
hostel at night. Over the years it becomes a recurrent theme of getting into
any Italian city late and not being able to find where I’m going. I blindly get
onto a waterbus, which takes an age to get to San Marco Square, detouring and
dropping off via the other Venetian islands. The crew play Iron Maiden’s
Somewhere in Time through a portable CD player. I haven’t heard the album in
years, but I’m on the water so long I get to listen to everything from Caught
From Somewhere in Time, up to and through the eight and half minutes of
Alexander the Great.
Humming Stranger in
a Strange Land to myself, I disembark. When lost late at night in a country
where you don’t speak the language, it’s always best to adopt a persona of
friendly but pathetic. I diagonally cross San Marco with some vague homing
instinct for where I’m heading, the rising waters of the lagoon seeping up
through grates in the stonework. Once into the narrow streets though, I’m lost
and stop strangers every few meters and point at the address on the printed
reservation sheet I carry. Most shrug their shoulders, but I guess my features
are Italian looking enough that most who don’t know the street find someone who
does.
By some kind of tag
team or tourist relay with me as the baton, late night walkers and late night
drinkers get me to the right street in the middle of the city. The entrance to
the hostel though is a nondescript and I manage to walk past it three times, my
pacing only arrested by the water’s edge, until I chance upon the right door
and ring.
It’s gone midnight,
but there’s someone on duty and I’m shown to my room, everyone else already
asleep on what are little more than camp beds. The adrenalin is pumping from
having got here after the many delays since flying out of Gatwick, but there nothing
more to be done but get undressed, find some comedy to listen to on my Walkman
(MP3 players being in their infancy) and go to sleep.
More thunder in the
night. Out here there’s nowhere else for the lightning to go and it explodes
above our heads, jolting everyone awake. A first introduction to my fellow
hostellers is half asleep, worried faces illuminated by brief bursts of white
hot light in the night. No one sleeps particularly well, even after the storm
has moved on. Still, it gives everyone something to talk about over breakfast.
I spend the best
part of a week in Venice, but with little money to spare and still being the
height of the tourist season in August, three or four hours of queuing has to
be endured to get into anywhere worth visiting anyway. Under the circumstances,
I walk from one end of the city to the other and back again, lost in my
thoughts, reading from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground in out-of-the-way
piazzas, people watching at the train station, playing solitaire in the hostel
at night and talking to the staff. Marco, who was on duty the night I arrived,
is a frequent source of entertainment. The hostel is a family run business,
he’s the youngest, tall and handsome, a cliché of an Italian man, well dressed
and distracted by every pretty face that crosses his path. He’s good company
though, curious and good taste in music. He brings in a guitar for us to take
turns playing.
There’s a lot of
Americans staying in the hostel, a middle aged couple from the Netherlands and a
noisy, self important woman from Canada. In my experience when people talk
about that brash American that was in the bar when they were in holiday,
bumming everyone out, more often than not that person will turn out to be a
Canadian. I’ve known many Canadians and while some of them have been dicks and
some excellent company, they’re all mad. This Canadian definitely falls into
the dickish end of the spectrum.
There’s also a
couple of British people. I don’t remember either of their names, but there a
girl who’s picked up or been picked up by Marco’s elder cousin while she’s been
staying at the hostel. He’s taking her to Rome. The rest of the family,
balding, fat middle aged men, are jealous that she’s not with them. The envy of
others is always hilarious when you have no personal stake in the sideshow.
Marco’s uncle introduces me to the phrase, ‘flying bitches’, which has no
English equivalent I think. It’s like gold digger or something like that. Ain’t
misogyny just tragic?
The other Brit here
is a guy who works for one of the London radio stations. LBC if I remember
rightly. The only bit of paid for culture I get to see when in Venice is
spending a morning together at the Guggenheim Museum. Exactly what you expect
from a Guggenheim Museum, lots of Cubism, Futurism and Pointillism. Then, after
catching the matinee performance of Flying Bitches back at the hostel, I end up
falling asleep on my bed listening to a BBC radio adaptation of The Big Sleep
(in Dublin and London I’d read Chandler’s Little Sister and The High Window). I
wake up in the early evening.
Venice is a strange
place, a place I need to return sometime and see a bit of the history, the
Doge’s Palace and the Basilica and the like. I’d bet I could also spend a
number of days just tracking down traces of Galileo’s life here. I’ve walked
over the Rialto Bridge a couple of dozen times on my frequent perambulations.
If you go out in the morning, the whole city smells of dog piss, because there
is no vegetation and everyone lets their dogs piss in the streets, which
evaporates in the rising heat and gives everything a pissy stink.
Venice of course
has the advantage of no motor traffic and so it’s a good place to walk around,
through streets sometime so narrow that you feel they will narrow down to infinity,
or emerge into an entirely different city (or maybe I’ve just read too many
Clive Barker novels). Virtually the entire island is stone, although there is a
small park well to the east of Saint Marco that I would wander down to a sit on
a park bench and watch the overlarge ferries motor by. I wonder how the ships
get in when the advantage of Venice, the reason people fled to these islands,
was that they were in waters too shallow for warships to invade. That’s a
question to which I still don’t know the answer.
As it turns out,
instead of catching a waterbus, I could have just got a bus from the airport as
far as Venice train station and I would still have had only to walk as far as I
did from San Marco. But what would have been the fun in that? The coming of
smart phones and Google Maps may take a lot of the frustration out of foreign
travel, but it also takes away just as much of the adventure. Part of the
romance and the personal of travelling is allowing yourself to be lost and find
something unique for you. Serendipity is magical. Knowing where you’re going,
well that’s simply overrated.
Bertrand Russell, who by any standard is
one of the leading intellectual figures of the twentieth century. He was one of
the very few leading intellectuals who opposed World War I. He was vilified,
and in fact ended up in jail, like his counterparts in Germany. From the 1950s,
particularly in the United States, he was bitterly denounced and attacked as a
crazy old man who was anti-American. Why? Because he was standing up for the
principles that other intellectuals also accepted, but he was doing something about
it.
Noam
Chomsky
There can be few
books that have been titled with such wilful understatement as The Basic
Writings of Bertrand Russell. Any book which includes sections on philosophy, logic,
mathematics, linguistics, relativity, education, ethics, psychology, history,
politics, religion, metaphysics, epistemology, east/west relations and the future
of the human race can hardly be described as basic.
Then again, by the
standards of Bertrand Russell, perhaps this is basic. He was a prodigious
writer on all of the above subjects and a great deal more and for years I have
liberated copies of his many books with titles like Political Ideas, Sceptical
Essays, In Praise of Idleness and The ABC of Relativity from second hand book shops.
I like Russell
because he thought the things that may people think, but actually did something
about them. He was born in 1874 to Lord and Lady Amberley, both of whom died
when he was young, and he was raised by his grandmother, Lady Russell, in
virtual isolation. It was expected by his elders that Russell would take up a
career in politics, but his passion was for mathematics and philosophy. As a
member of the ruling classes he could have taken the easy way out, acted as
minister in a Liberal government, taken up his seat in the House of Lords, not been
a bother to anyone. Instead, he went in the opposite direction, serving time in
prison for his opposition to the First World War, being sacked from his professorship
at City College in New York for his views on sexual liberation, vociferously supporting
the campaign for nuclear disarmament. In 1957, Russell wrote an open letter to
both Eisenhower and Khrushchev, calling for an end to the Cold War. Similarly,
at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he sent telegrams to both Khrushchev and
John F Kennedy. Khrushchev assured him that Russia would not be reckless,
whereas Kennedy returned his telegram unopened.
Most people would,
I think, be glad to have lived half the life that Bertrand Russell lived,
displayed half the bravery and understated intelligence that Russell displayed.
What comes across from reading this collection of articles isn’t just the sheer
depth and breadth of subjects of which Russell was informed enough to talk
about, but also serves as reminder that simple ideas and statements sometime
need to be reiterated. In my own writing, I often reject trains of thought as
they seem so obvious that it would be patronising even to mention them.
Yet simple ideas
aren’t always obvious to everyone and even when they are, they bare restatement
as a kind of reset button when the world seems to have lost its mind. Russell’s
thoughts on religion, politics and education are often simple but never
simplistic. It’s worth being reminded that the purpose of education isn’t to
teach but to indoctrinate, to question why agnosticism towards God or heaven is
any less sensible that agnosticism toward Zeus or Thor, to remind politicians
that global conflict is in no one’s best interest except the manufactures of
the weapons. Russell never tired of stating and restating his thoughts on these
subjects.
Russell’s principal
academic pursuits though were in the regions of philosophy and mathematics and
there is much in this volume regarding both subjects. Philosophy is often used
as a dirty word in the scientific disciplines, yet I think many physicists
would benefit from a working knowledge of philosophy, as would philosophers
benefit from a little knowledge of basic physical principles. Sadly it is often
a case of never, or rarely, the twain shall meet and before Russell, the last
significant mathematician-philosopher was probably Rene Descartes in the 17th
century. Russell wrote two major works on the history of philosophy, A History
of Western Philosophy and Wisdom of the West, sections from both of which are
included here. A History of Western Philosophy in particular has been used as a
standard textbook in British institutions for many years and I can highly recommend
it for anyone who wants a good overview of the subject, as well as a critical
overview of some of the major triumphs and failures in thought of the philosophers
in question, through from Socrates to
John Dewey.
For a general
overview of the work and thoughts of Bertrand Russell himself however, you
could do worse than start with The Basic Writings of… At 736 pages, you
certainly get a lot for your money and while you will almost certainly find
some of it going over your head (it has taken me three abortive attempts to get
past the sections relating to Russell’s Magnus Opus, Principia Mathmatica), time
spent with Bertrand Russell is never time wasted. He was a rare breed, of which
maybe only the likes of Noam Chomsky or Tony Benn bear comparison. He was politically
active right until the end of his life, spending seven days in prison in 1961 for his involvement in anti-nuclear demonstrations at the ripe old age of 89.
Russell died aged
97 on the 2 February 1970, exactly three years to the day before I was born. I
would like to have known him, but he left such a plethora of publications that
settling for the next best thing isn’t a million miles away from this desire. Our
great and prolific writers get read less and less these days. It is our duty to
reintroduce them to new generations. There is much that they can teach us.
Not much getting it done in the last week so my task this week is to get back on track. Here's the first of two articles for today with more doubling and tripling up to come in the next few days.
Review: Abarat – Clive Barker
I have been a massive
fan of Clive Barker for over twenty years. Weaveworld and Imajica alone I have
read at least half a dozen times each and read both of them again in the last two years.
Indeed, it seems incredible to me that in this time of Game of Thrones and
tediously overlong Hobbit adaptations that neither of these epic fantasy horror
novels has been turned into a mini-series. It would be easy to do them wrong,
but just as easy to get them dead right.
I’ve gotten a
little behind with my Clive Barker reading in recent years and so have just finished
reading 2004’s Abarat, the first novel in a planned quintet (three of the four
have been so far published). In many ways, Abarat is exactly what one would
expect from the man who gave the world Pinhead and Hellraiser. As with all
Barker novels, Abarat is about a world which lies beyond our world. In the middle
of nowhere, outside a nondescript Minnesota town, is a lighthouse thousands of
miles from open water, the last relic of an ancient jetty. Yet this lighthouse
houses a mechanism which, when triggered, brings the sea, the Sea of Izabella,
to the Mid-West.
In the waters of
the Sea Izabella lies the twenty five island chains of Abarat, each island permanently
stuck in a different hour of the day or night, with the twenty fifth, Odom’s Spire, a
mystery to many. Many ambitious men wish to rule Abarat entire, including the
psychotic Christopher Carrion, ruler of the island of Midnight.
Carried on the
waves of the Sea of Izabella, schoolgirl Candy Quackenbush is swept into Abarat
from Chickentown, Minnesota. For Candy, read Alice or Dorothy, for Abarat is
essentially a fable for children and adults alike, as with the 1992 novel, The
Thief of Always. This is Clive Barker though and all the usual fantastical and grotesque
characters are to found in abundance, like John Mischief, a practiced thief with horns on
which grow the seven additional heads of his brothers.
Abarat owes much to
the genre in which it takes its place, not just Alice in Wonderland and L.
Frank Baum’s Oz books, but also The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Hans
Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. I definitely prefer Barker’s adult
novels and short stories, as he’s at his best when his imagination is allowed
to be unfettered and uncensored (the comic book adaptation of Rawhead Rex, for
instance, would give any child nightmares for weeks with its graphic depiction
of a child’s entrails being devoured by the eponymous hell beast). Yet it’s a
decent enough tale and I’m looking forward to reading the sequel, Days of Night,
Nights of War, the edition illustrated by Barker of which I picked up from a second
hand bookshop for £2.99. Bargain.
What does you
conscience say?You
shall become the person you are.
Catharsis
This
is still my catharsis. The routine I need to stick to day in day out, to gain a
sense of perspective and practice the basics of my art so that I may excel in
it. During the last
peak,
when I was addicted to sitting here, I churned out some not bad stuff. Here can
I write what I want, when I want, so that I may go on and write what I need to
write. Without this I soon sink into lethargy and lack of confidence. It does
matter what I write here, whether it is inane and shit. This is the foundation
from which I can build a career. Nothing is disallowed (double negative, I hate
it when that happens).
Was
talking to a friend about positive role models, and the lack of, last night. I
told her that I wanted to be my own role model. This is true. Whereas I find
many writers and musicians appealing, none of them attract me wholeheartedly. Back
to the Eponymist ideal again. The idea of individuality (Christ being the only
Christian). I can take pointers from people, but ultimately I stand alone. I
don’t believe in nationality or religion or race. At best, any social group is
a loose conglomeration. At best, unified through one or two ideals. Which is
fine. Society could not operate without community spirit. However, one of the
reasons for the breakdown of society in the west is a realisation that these
ideals have become transparent. Immigration and the global ideal are partly to
blame. The world has moved forward so fast that our narrow perceptions have not
been able to shift with it. Acclimatise to it. Our perceptions need to be
refocused. Religion and the family unit used to provide the bedrock, but they
have slowly been eroded. The downfall of at least one these is due to it being
based on erroneous assumptions, dressed up as truth. Can you guess which one?
We
have to become fluid. To be able to shift our allegiances according to the
situation. There are times when I am affected by national boundaries. Football,
I mean. In fact, sport is almost the only time when most of us feel a strong
pull from nationality (or it should be). I envisage a future where there are no
longer any nations. A persons country will be made up only of the places that
they have been to. Not an phoney affinity with people they have never met or
place they have never seen. My nation is Liverpool and Cardiff. Madrid and
Paris. Amsterdam and Bruges. I want to live in a world where in one regard a
person maybe my opponent, yet in another they will be my contemporary. As a
writer, I consider Hemmingway fascinating, but as a man I doubt we would have
much in common. He writes with a passion for his subject, but I have little
desire to experience bull fighting or fishing. This is what we should all be
moving towards.
I
believe that the purpose of the universe is to achieve infinity. The best way
for it to do that is by generating as many possibilities as possible, thereby
increasing the chances of it happening. Infinity is the point at which all
possibilities have been played out. Now, if this is true, then life on this
planet should be diversifying in as many ways as it can. Originality is the key.
Certain well meaning types will tell you that there is nothing original. That
may be true. But there is always a new spin to an old idea. A unique rendering
of prevalent influences. This is the code to which I hope to stay true. A fresh
form injected writing machine. All artistic disciplines should be in a
continued state of growth. That is why I hate popular culture so much. The
continued re-rendering and re-hashing of the same ideas over and over again. The
law of diminishing returns. These are possibilities being played out it is
true, but when so much time seems to be spent on producing works of dubious
artistic value, it is hard to see where our next evolutionary step is to come
from. Stagnation abounds and I think this is its one objective. I am a big
admirer of the Bard, but the comedy in his plays is simply not very funny. Comedy
has moved on in leaps and bounds in the last four hundred years (Python, Bill
Hicks, Spaced), just as it should.
Anarchy.
The more and more I think about anarchy, the more I read, the more I come to
the conclusion that we are all of us, for the most part, anarchists. The basic
tenet of anarchism is this: Do whatever you want to do, so long as it does not
interfere with anyone else. This is one of the principles I try to abide by: Do
what you want but do no harm. Something I’ve not always followed as closely as
I should. Now, is this not what we do every day of our lives. We may go to
work, but no one forces is us. We do it through our own volition. Okay, so we
do it to get paid, but it may be said that there is a contract between employee
and employer. A symbiotic relationship. One cannot survive without the other. We
get married, have children, but then there is merely a refocusing of our anarchic
principles. Our family becomes us and the family may do what it wants, as long
as it does no harm (including to itself).
The
problem with a large part of the anarchist movement, as I see it, is that they
only hear the first part. “What, do what I want? Cool! See ya.” “Hang on,
there’s more…Oh fuck it.” But isn’t that always the way with ideologies? They
get distorted and perverted for personal gain, until they bear little relation
to the original idea (cf. the major religions of the world)! The problem with
the anarchist movement is that it seeks to politicise what is in essence a
personal philosophy. Anarchism is a lifestyle choice. As soon as you try to
mould it into a movement it ceases to be anarchy. Buddhism is very close to
anarchism. It is essentially about meditation. When you pervert it into
religion it ceases to be Buddhism. There’s a great line in the film ‘Dogma’. All
about how humans have missed the essential point of religion. It isn’t about
religion, its about ideas. “Ideas can be changed. Religion is what gets people
killed.”
I
do not seek to enforce any idea upon my fellow man, except one. Be yourself. Be
the person that you are. What does you
conscience say? asks Nietzsche. You
shall become the person you are. Be your own religion. Your own ideal. Your
own political party; your own role model. Be your own trail blazing its way
toward the horizon. And if any other line happens to intersect yours, well then
that’s just a happy coincidence. A bonus. I think Henry Miller put it best:
…you
won’t be dead, you won’t be indifferent, you won’t be insensitive, you won’t be
alarmed and panicky, you won’t be jittery, you won’t throw rotten eggs because
you don’t understand. You will want to understand everything, even the
disagreeable things. You will want to accept more and more – even what seems
hostile, evil, threatening. Yes, you will become more and more like God. You
won’t have to answer and advertisement in the newspaper in order to find out
how to talk with God, God will be with you all the time. And if I know what I’m
talking about, you will listen more and talk less.
Okay,
that’s enough cultural referencing for the moment. I am your sheep herder, kneel before me. Quiet!
6am. Why is it whenever I arrive in a new European city, it’s always 6am?
Amsterdam the first time. Amsterdam the second time (though the second time is
a few years ahead of me at this point). Today it’s Madrid, having taken a night
bus from Almeria. Nina is low on sleep, low on blood sugar, short on patience.
We need to find somewhere to stay and get some sleep, but we don’t have any change
for the phone to ring places and ask. I run back down to the Puerta del Sol to
buy a copy of the Independent, a day old, overpriced European edition that has half as much
content as the home grown version.
That summer, Tim Roth was the face of H&M. We saw posters plastered with
his face everywhere we went, in Manchester, in the papers, on the Paris
underground. Nina went into full rant mode every time one materialised in front
of her. Travelling on the Madrid underground we were spared the sight of him. “Thank
fuck.” she exclaimed as we swiftly approached the city centre. Coming out of
the subway at Puerta del Sol, I turned around and collapsed with laughter as
Nina’s face fell. There, a hundred foot long by fifty high, Tim Roth’s face
looking down on to the plaza from an enormous H&M advertising canvas. Her
mood didn’t improve any.
After three or four phones calls in mangled Spanish, we finally find a
cheap enough place right on the corner of the Puerta del Sol. Six stories up in
a residential block, with no windows to the outside world, just a sash window
to the corridor that I guess anyone could be looking in through if they stood
on a chair (well we’d have given them a good show at least). The room, the only
free room, has twin beds, a common theme ever since we arrived in Spain, having
hitchhiked all the way from Lancashire.
We wake late in the afternoon, sallying out into the afternoon to take
in the sights, drink tea and coffee in the cafes along the way there and share the
first of who knows how many McRib meals. We lived on those things when we were
in Madrid, two or three a day. We ate so many that McDonalds retired the combo
in our honour.
It was the end of a three week journey from Blackburn to Northampton to
London to Folkestone to Dover to Calais to Rotterdam to Paris to Nimes to
Barcelona to Almeria to Madrid. Only Liverpool Airport remained on our itinerary.
It was the most enjoyable journey I’ve yet taken with anyone. We spent no more
than minutes out of each other’s company in all that time and yet failed to get
on each other’s nerves, except during early morning arrivals in new cities.
Paris we got dropped off in the arrivals lounge of Charles de Gaulle Airport at
4am and had to wait two hours to catch the RER into the centre of town. There
we stayed in a Formula1 hotel in a rough part of Paris where the drug dealers
tried to sell you shit in the lobby and where someone was stabbed in their room
on our floor. We saw him lying face down on the bed inside his room. Nina was
convinced he was dead, but I swear I saw his feet moving. The sheets were awash
with blood however and we argued the toss about it for the remainder of our journey.
The next day we moved out and got into a hostel in a better part of town.
Madrid is a blur, I can’t really remember what we did in what order, but
we managed to fit a lot in. We drank in Hemingway’s favourite bar, ate tapas in
tapas restaurants, went to Madrid’s premier rock club where no one danced. We
went to Reina Sofia gallery, where we saw Guernica and Dali’s Great
Masturbator. We got lost trying to find the gallery and ended up walking down a
back alley which should have been called Dog Shit Alley, because you couldn’t
walk ten yards without having to step over some deposit. It knocked Nina sick.
Our final night in the hotel, Nina got all dolled up to go out to the
club, then took a tumble on the stairs down to the elevator in the hotel, collapsing
and falling down three or four steps in comic slow motion. She bounded up in
high speed and insisted we carry on, even though a lump the size of an egg was
forming on the side of her shin. Lots of vodka took the pain away.
That was the zenith of the brief time that we were together. The death
throes of our relationship took longer than the relationship itself. We spent
our last night in Madrid sleeping rough in the airport, having failed to blag a
cheap flight home. We ended up on an Easyjet flight, but it didn’t leave until
the following evening. As always, I could sleep anywhere, but Nina spent
another disturbed night on the metal airport seats. “I just want someone to put
a sign on it that says ‘bed’.” she said. “Then I’d be fine.”
She had a mortal fear of flying and it took half a bottle of vodka just
to get her on the plane. Even then she freaked out as we were taxiing to the
runway, shouting that she wanted to get off, that it was her ‘human right’ to
be let off the plane. I somehow managed to calm her down and once we were in
the air she was fine, staring out of the darkened window at all the lights
below for much of the three hour return flight.
Many years later I went back to Madrid. I found the door to our hotel
and sat writing in the Starbucks at the corner of the Purta del Sol, as it was
the only place where I could get a half decent cup of tea. I went back to the
Reina Sofia and greeted Guernica like an old friend. This time though, I paid a
visit to the Prado to see Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Goya’s
Second of May 1808, Third of May 1808 and his black paintings. Another woman was
on my mind, waiting for me back home. Instead of drinking in Hemingway’s
favourite bar I would sit in internet café’s talking to her on IM while
listening to BBC radio on iPlayer. I took the train to Gibraltar and back, went
on a day trip to Morocco, flew out of Madrid Airport and on to Milan, Florence
and Rome. You get more done on your own, but it’s much more fun to experience
the journey with someone you love, even if that love lasts only a day. It’s
quality not quantity that counts.
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