fabrizio and fabrizio

i cycled and cycled and asked people if there was a way of following the coast to calabria without followin the superstrada 106, with its occasional squished single-lane shared with thundering lorries and other vrooming vehicles.     i asked two other cyclists one morning and they told me to tuck in behind them and amazing how much wind friction is reduced there.   they wore skintight clothing to reduce wind friction and ate little pieces of jelly for energy.
i had just crossed the bridge over the stream one morning and was preparing to set off for a day's cycling when two young men passed and said "ciao" before turning around and telling me that they were staying in an abandoned house up on the hill next to the old castle and if i wanted to spend a night or two with them i would be welcome.   at that stage i was still full of plans of cycling to sicilia and climbing mount etna; as the days passed in their company that plan was happily postponed.  first of all we went to laura's house to drink coffee and breakfast, and then to andrea's house for lunch.  it was andrea who had lent them his adze and other agricultural implements. 

it was a beautiful spot where they had began to settle.  it was a half hour's walk from the coast road and surrounded by a field full of blue flowers with a horse at one end who brayed every half hour or so.    fabrizio and fabrizio (as they were both called) were full of plans of living there and working the land and planting and living off the land.    also collecting wild plants like wild asparagus, which grows all along the side of the paths.   there was a nearby abandoned orange grove, which you have to scramble through the undergrowth to attain, where the orange trees are laden with orange fruit and they are delicious and sweet.  there is so much opportunity for living off the land here in fertile sunny calabria, and occupying old houses which are lying abandoned all over the mountains.  they had already done a lot of work on the house to make it habitable, and had an old wooden bookcase filled with a modest little library of books by Hesse, Nietzsche, Goethe, a novel by Italo Calvino, Henry Miller's novelistic autobiographical account and an old tattered copy of I Vagabondi del Dharma - an italian translation of the dharma bums.
however, robert the shepherd passed every day in his little white car and, besides his habitual ciao salutation, he began to really insist that it would be better if we pushed on before the owner turned up.

therefore fabrizio and i set off one day towards the mountains to look for another house.

there were so many of them, but the conditions of nearby water source, quite far from the road, unlikely to attract attention, roof intact and surrounding land cultivatable made it a special combination when they were all met.  we followed the rocky bed of a river for a while, and when the land rose and the mountains began, we spotted a lonely looking property high up on the hillside with no obvious means of access.  that was when we began to climb up a little path, which soon became lost in the prickly undergrowth, and i said to fabri "rarely have i met someone else with such a keenness to explore".    our desire to attain that house was large but after an hour of slow progress through the scratchy bushes, it was fabrizio who declared, as he was crawling ahead, his body pressed close to the ground, that "it is too difficult to go on", and all we could do was laugh heartily at our state of discomfort and the ultimate unfeasibiliy of our self-chosen endeavour.

fabrizio loved to cook, over a fire outside the house as evening was falling, and more often than not it was pasta with tomato sauce, seasoned with the wild herbs he had found round about. 
fabrizio, however, wasn't so fond of cooking, and found more delight in breaking up the hard earth with the adze under the sun.
therein began to grow a slight tension, for fabrizio had fair skin and always opted to avoid the midday sun.  fabrizio said to me:  "how can you choose to work the land if you don't like being in the sun?".

and one day - how do these things happen? - an argument broke out, and fabrizio swung his rucksack over his shoulder and headed off to look for another abandoned property closer to the coast, and look for some wage-earning work in a bar or restaurant, because nothing can one do without money. 
perhaps it is because
"everything put together
sooner or later falls apart"

in any case later in the day fabri came back with danilo who has a car and we all crowded in and transported all the pots and cooking utensils to the other house.  it was nice to be so close to the beach and the swim in the sea but it was also close to the road and the drone of vehicles, and my thoughts began to turn again to following the road to sicilia.

first of all fabrizio is keen for me to meet his friends pepe and rossella, an older couple who have spent all their lives looking after goats and sheep and a vineyard and making cheese and salsicio and wine and bread and selling them at the big market in reggio.  "it is they who inspire me so much" fabrizio tells me, "to eat good food and to know where your food comes from is so important.  you feel so healthy - in body and spirit - when you eat their food.  you will see when you get there".

greece

Thank you Sun for your Warmth and Light which - when the clouds do not obscure you - you radiate to our Earth.
the moon only gleams because first you shine,
and the warmth and light of the campfire is only possible because of your energy stored in parts of old trees.


the sun says to the moon: Shine!
the moon replies: gleam
the sun says: like this moon - shine, shine, beam!
but all the moon wants to do is ghostly gleam.



i found a jet of water by an olive grove on the road south of Vlore, and washed my body and my clothes, and my fresh body and refreshed spirit carried me up the thousand metre pass into the pine trees beneath the mountain with patches of snow.  spinning down the other side, i told myself:  i have never travelled so fast on a bicycle before.  a bird with black and white feathers swooped in front of me and for a few seconds we shared our flights, then he or she swooped off.  i was whizzing down the road, zooming a thousand metres above the vast extension of rippling sparkling ocean, zooming into the golden haze beyond the sea.

it may sound poetic, "the golden haze beyond the sea", but that is what it was.   the sparkling sea blended into the golden haze and the golden haze melded with the blue sky (whatever the sky is).

okay, "i perceived a golden haze beyond the sea".

or to be scientific, "a golden haze beyond the sea was observed".



the albanian phrase "excuse me, is this the road to greece?" served me well and had me crossing the greek border close to the coast; not travelling far inland as google maps suggested that i would have to do.
maker of googlemaps - ill-informed about the slick new ionian highway that winds though the valleys of the beautiful southern albanian highlands.  new and shiny, although the greek border guard said it was built six years ago.  almost empty, too.   maybe in summer it becomes busy.

i had graeme coxton's blur lyrics in mind when i realised that i was following the herd down to greece.
the herd had not arrived yet but i could see that the coast was well set-up to cater for them, and attract them. 
cycling to greece had always been my plan, more than actually being in greece,
greece, however, is a very nice place to be.  a near-empty road winding along the coast through playful olive grove hillsides which descend to little villages or little beaches.  the only activity from the countless coastal hotels were gardeners pruning shrubs and trees.  an abundant green vegetation in the shade and flowers being beautiful in the sun.  lots of young green nettle leaves making a tasty soup with potatoes, etc.  after a few days of sun soaking and listening to little lapping waves i was happy to cycle seriously again.  i liked the thought of being in italy, in a great part due to language reasons (in greece i scrutanised the noticeboards, and listened to people's conversations, but it was all greek to me). italy also because it led me closer to my summer goal of being in scotland in order to witness happy people becoming happily wed.

in greece i went back to finding food in bins, and one day came across bunches of yellow bananas outside a series of supermarkets, and many packets of biscuits.  i said "it will take me days to eat all of these", but didn't like to see them lying in bin, and so lashed them to my bike anyway.
in the port town of igoumenitsa i found an opportunity to give them away when i met the immigrant population, who were playing football on a patch of wasteland when i arrived - almost all morrocans looking to cross to italy (without the required visa), where there it is easier to find work they told me, and all of them looking for food in bins themselves.  i gave them bananas and biscuits and they gave me their smiles.
waiting for the midnight ferry crossing to italy my eye was caught by a youth climbing up the drainpipe through the window of the terminal building.  it was a scrambly job for him and he had to stop and rest on the dividing bars of the windows.  i didn't want to stare but it was pretty interesting to watch his progress.  then my attention was caught by someone flashing a light at me through the window.  through some unclear hand signals, i thought that maybe he wanted to know where i was going, so i pressed my ferry ticket to brindisi against the window.    we made uncomprehendable hand signals to each other before realising that voice travelled through the glass, and then he told me in english in low tones that he was tunisian that he had a wife from newcastle that he had worked in london three years, did i know such and such a cafe in edinburgh near the mosque where he had also worked?  i wanted to ask him why was he wanting to cross the border unseen, or helping others to do so, (as we were speaking a series of young men were making the ascent of the drainpipe) but all he said was, "it is risky" with a cheery expression.
he made me remember the young man i met on the road in morocco who told me he had tried to cross from the canary islands to spain twice but had been caught both times by the police boat. "i will try again", he had said cheerily.
later, i was standing with my bicycle on the dock wondering how i could board my ferry when a man ran past and crawled under a nearby lorry.  he was followed by a woman in police uniform who quickly found him with her torch.  then a man arrived on a motorcycle and hauled him out and began yelling at him in words i could not understand but whose vituperative tone reminded me of the barking of an aggressive dog.
the caught man assumed a cowering posture, but i could tell that he was silently indignant.


ahhhh      (sigh expressing something indefinable)

most every body wants a slice of wealthy pie.

what is money? how does it come about? and how is it we have managed to generate such wealthy conditions in certain portions of the earth?  where everybody finds labour - fashioning products from the earth's resources or providing some service - and is paid hansomly.


it is as if the world were a small patch of land, and all the countries were ponds, and all the humans were frogs.  warmth signifies wealth in this analogy - and frogs from the warm pond can hop wheresoever they please and splash in all the other cool ponds, but when a frog who happens to have been born in a cold pond wants to partake of the warmth of the warm pond, a barrier is erected in the form of border control.