Child of the Planet

Years ago, I was on the way home from a Tai Chi session, and was thinking of giving it up. I started the lessons cause I thought it would help calm my mind, but I ended up being more manic from concentrating on trying to do the movements right. The concentration needed to empty my mind, made the exercise a bit pointless. I stopped at a bottle shop to pick up a bottle of wine. At the time I was living with four flatmates and we would regularly have a group dinner on a Friday night. One of the housemates cooked, and everyone else bought along a bottle. I scanned the shelves through the glass refrigerator doors, and saw a bottle of Italian white. The glass was shaped like a fish. We were having fish that night. '˜Kismit!' thinks I. That night, when dinner was served, all were impressed when I banged the bottle on the table. We split the seal and shared it around. Everyone took a sip, and then looked at me. I cracked up. The wine tasted like fish, or chemicals, or somet...

This is a story extracted from notes of my trip through Turkey I had been staying for a week or so in Olympos, which is right down the bottom of Turkey on the coast. Olympos is known for being the home of the Olympic €˜eternal flame ™ which the visitor can go and see (and try and put out by standing on, if one wants to be a silly bugger and has been drinking.) the flames come licking up out of the rocks. These days the fire is a bit feeble, but in the old days, the flames used to be intense enough that ships used them to navigate at night. It's also known for a community of travellers living in tree houses. It was time to find a new horizon, so a group of us decided to head off to see the people who lived in caves out in Goreme. Antalya was a stop off point on our way to Goreme. We had arrived in a minibus from the camping site, and the next bus didn't €™t leave until the evening, so we decided to spend the day seeing sites of interest outsi...

I'€™m not a fan of flying. This is not the same as being afraid of flying. Flying is one of the most unnatural activities a human can be subject to. It'€™s wrong, and I don't understand why the religious nuts haven'€™t condemned this abomination of god universe. I'€™ll willingly board a plane, let them bolt the doors closed, and allow two turkeys in the cockpit to chauffeur me to my destination. But! I'€™m not happy with the situation. Especially if the plane performs a hard banked turn just after take off, and I'€™m 'lucky' enough to have a window seat on the inside of the turn. The view is straight down. Exactly the same view that I would have if the plane disintegrated, and I was tipped out into the air. Propeller driven planes are the worst. When a jet fires up, the whine from the turbines sounds hi-tech. When a prop starts its engines, it sounds like the dodgy V8 that the local white trash cruise around town in.