This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land

Of course it was a blur; a pulped mash of memory and muse; of sights and sounds filtered through the skin of travel, osmotic sensations rippling. In the blink of an eye we came back; a red eye journey that was longer than just miles. It seemed to us, this journey, to stretch beyond continent and ocean; city and country. We have become more elasticated, as though we were both ready to be propelled back into the culture we had come from and probably never really left. We had arrived on the oft-kissed tarmac of Heathrow. Just as we knelt down to thank our lucky stars, someone sang a torch song and set themselves alight in Glasgow and the rolling, breaking, repeating news of CNN flashed in the arrivals hall unlikely pictures of fundamentalists being hooked by neds in a familiar location.

Of course it was a welcome blur. A year spent away from friends and family often felt like a long time. But I could never have allowed myself to feel too cut off as email, letters, blogs and texts saw to distance being shrunk to a matter of seconds. The cliche is that when you come back everything seems as though you never left, the status quo prevailing. I'm not sure that's true. People change and lives continue, hopefully happily perhaps even dramatically, but there is an inexorable sense of movement to coming back. Just as there can be to staying.

When I left I felt as though I was being ripped out of the familiar, torn from roots deeply embedded, a life impacted yet fortunate and I even imagined that it might be strange or awkward or even difficult to reinsert myself upon my return as though I might have gone native in the expat compound or become so jungled on deserrt islands that I could no longer see the vines for the leaves. Of course I learnt that people are strangely the same in either place. Sure there are ticks of culture that gob-smack; there are the layers of power and corruption that defy all optimism in the progression of humanity, there are displays of human love and kindness that bedevil definition and trite summation. If I have learnt anything this past year then I have understood that these ticks,layers and displays can be applied to either country.

And now posting from Mui Ne, the beach completely lashed by whipped up waves, their squall sounding menace and nearly drowning the sound of the dodgy ceiling fan rattling its noise, threatening to come loose and cut through the humid air of our bungalow. I have returned just as I know truly, deeply that I have left.

Click on the link called ' Sid and Lucas in the Borders' for the latest quicktime movie.

I Asterix: Free from speech

And so we came to our brave new world. A chip off the old block. Eastern bloc. We arrived with trepidation but with the hope of the resuscitation of our senses; from the ritual of routine to the edgy dance of expectation; from close proximity of the familiar to nuzzling with strangers in queues, in the streets as we shaved our safety limits, the protective barriers removed with the hope of fate. I arrived in the Tropics and packed everything with me; previous addictions, the ghosts of predilictions and the absorbing neuroses of the new. How would I survive without friends and the familiar ? I cut loose from an anchor. I am no longer at home. I am offshore now. Soon I will no longer be a resident of the United Kingdom but then it seems in my absence Scotland isn't either.



It is possible for me to vote from afar. How strange to be able to affect a change in a place where I don't live. How strange it must be for people to vote and affect no change in a place where they live. Does everybody live in the same place ?

Back in the ' old country' ( as one Alzheimered Cisco septogenarian walking the Saigon streets described his former life) resident status had previously induced apathy and anger at the futility of the vote. Who needs it ? Who needs them ? But truly is this not a priviliged position after seeing with my own eyes, mass numbness and an exploitable naivety. From Chairman of the board to Pol Pot. I could vote via d*m*cr*** ( can you fathom the asterix, the hysterics that necessitate such punctuation?) and make a country free and yet it is difficult to forget that there are countries that held ele**io*s recently for one party, the winner a foregone conclusion.

I am a guest, a working alien improving the prospects of a privilged few. I have been afforded the luxury of travel both within the country and some of its neighbours, Thailand and Cambodia. If I am tempted to make protracted statements about what I think is wrong like a kneejerk, reactionary expat getting boiled about poor service then it is always useful to remember earlier posts on this website and to recall the vibrancy of hope, the verve of the new and unseen, the untested and unknown.

Could do an epsiodic, sit-com style recap; the first step on the archetypal, tropical beach, the first breath of hot, filthy Saigon air; wading into more work-based pressure and stress than ever I have ever had to endure; then finding myself at home and at ease with Kate. She was and remains my solace, my hope and my future. And soon as the shock of the new eases we begin to explore wilder shores and mountain air before swivelling experience again and making sure we shop to the hilt in Bangkok's open market before finding moments of such tangible hurt and nerve-shredding horror in the Killing Fields near Phnom Penh,Cambodia. And then there are the more day to day events. We watch as cyclos pedal by with sheets of glass stretched across half the road; we walk around the park where the whole of Saigon plays, exercises and snogs so innocently after dark. Here, is the Saigon that enthralls, amuses, saddens and befuddles. This is a place of contradictions, contrasts and contretemps. We are sickened by a multinational that raves it up in the park with loud music and loud colour ( the way to get attention here) as they seek to promote food supplements that swell the naturally lithe and svelte Vietnamese body. Of course it is cultural. A fat kid means prosperity, there ain't no heroin chic here. But we are also touched by the genuine innocence of people emerging into controlled awareness. There is a Blyton-esque feel to picnicing sexuality that camps out for brief moments in the twilight. There is only a fondle in the park before marriage. There is no where else to go. And of course the world over sexuality and gender is the basis of so much oppression and expectation. Of course the woman must be a virgin when she marries but a large number of south-east asian men will have visited a prostitute many times before they marry their bride.

And there came a time when we stopped traveling, when we were no longer explorers on well worn routes. We travelled without sweating a drop and we explored without a wilting map. We have been writers, not so much in residence but in quarantine but we have been here, existing with coiled imagination; in abeyance, in waiting, in research and in preparation. I have been both absorbed in the newness and reminded of the ' old country' , the things, desires that have come to reassert themselves so strongly. And The Lotus Seed performance, so well realised, helped with that. Writing coming to life can only serve to act as a prescient reminder that there is so little time and so much to say.



But that is also a well travelled epithet. Those who have read this blog over the year and who know me will have heard that many times before. A melodramatic conceit that I do my best to pass off as belief in myself. But as a final thing for this long,last blog of my first year here, it must be said that I have really appreciated the feedback you have given me about the blog and it's been good to know that it gives me a connection to much-loved friends and family in the old country.

It Means The World To Me

I was with the tea ladies, scurrying between their legs as they balanced trays of scones and chocolate crispies. The table was already groaning with white bread sandwiches, their crusts tidily discarded into their own bag near the piano of the music room. We were in the church hall and the stockinged feet friends of the Alloway Parish Drama Group were in full swing; egg mayonniase poised, vol-au-vents at the ready. With only a few minutes to the interval, there was still the urn to be boiled, still the napkins (paper) to be triangulated, it was all so reassuringly co-ordinated. Even my movements which I thought so subversive and covert must have been expected as though they knew exactly what the 10 year old self-styled food raider must have been after. They turned a blind eye as I scooped chocolate crispies into my hand as I flashed them a smile I hoped would be distracting.

I watched in fascination while my mother and her actor friends were on stage at the church hall. Normally this was a terrible place, a venue for enforced cub scouts until someone, perhaps not me, had had enough. I think I left of my own accord. I think I was thrown out. Either way it was a relief not to be toggled but to be enthralled by the smell of the well to do silently listening to an am dram denouement; or perhaps politely tittering as a Ray Cooney farce or an Ayckbourn witticism rang out. Here I was allowed my privilged scampering between acts because my mother was part of the suburban troupe who performed twice a year in halo'd surroundings.

I remember the excitment and nerve of seeing her on stage in Elvira, her Noel Coward bravura still ringing in memory, still recalled as a special moment. This was what it was like to perform, to be on stage, to be noticed for doing something. Perhaps being a teacher, the utlimate centre of attention, was not enough for her. She needed to feel the nerves of performance, the rush of adrenalin as the curtain parted. I can understand that.



And now I quickly take a look at the two actresses who are performing the adaptation of my Miss Globe X story in a Japanese-run cafe with an Indochine air. This is a first for everyone concerned and I suspect for Saigon itself. We are frivilous expats having an art thing of course but have slipped under the wire the virtues of airing gender roles and sexual stereotyping. In the marvelous performances of the two Miss Globes, there are the nuances of the narrative but also the live emotion of the moment. Leaping from page to mouth it is possible to vibrate with something here. It's such a sad yet angry story and it took on a life of its own thanks to the actresses and their intuitive director. There have been many collaborations over the years from a dingy urban warehouse to a sweaty Den Haag venue and each one has contributed directly or indirectly to the development of my writing.

It does mean the world to me.




There are two short Quicktime Movies. Miss Globe X Premier and Impromptu French Jazz Band. Photos courtesy of Robert Appino. Thanks Bob.