Adventure Babies

Prague, then from Decmber 5th to December 11th 2007 was to be our own cocoon of love and delicious foods! sumptuous hot wines and spiced cheeses abound in these parts as they compete for the attention of thine craven nose!

simmering with urgency and preoccupation Prague is indeed an architechtural delight ,full of intricate designs and almost absurdly delicate yet powerful merchant houses, refined with culture yet financed with the spoils of European commerce. Bizarre Gehry modernism, or sly Czech Cubism, lots of crawling and frozen monuments to the dead, Jews especially, a bizarre mix of post communist capitalistic planning and seedy areas of Wensclas Square combine with unabashed traditional markets, noveau styled cafes with chandeliers, and piano playing yeomen in cheap suits. There is fantastic beer a plenty! and lots of delicious pigs prepared in one way or a paradoxical other.

on one particular evening we found a simple Czech wine bar, that on further discovery turned into myriad labyrinth with seven underground chambers playing music and selling cheap drinks in many bars! we met some guys from Eastern Slovakia who as it turned out were table football champions of the central bohemian area, we lost about 10-0 8-2 9-1 10-0 repeatedly, but brilliant fun. Prague was really enjoyable! on a grand scale, its a bit sickening, but finding little gems,little backalleys with hidden delights, bars, scupltures and bizarre graffiti make it a city which will reward you for touristic endeavour. The train Station was a seedy buzzling dirty disorganised shagpile of Eastern European oil and alchol lovers, but it really gave us a fresh perspective on prague as we crawled out from its smoky bosom; the train winding over the Vltava into decrepid moss sewn stations with crubmling facades and glazed men in long trenchcoats; the city quickly giving way to wooded areas and embankments with tiny matchbox houses of yellow, blue green, purple, orange and black.

Underneath the very arches of charles bridge exists a candelit bohemian outdoor wine cellar, something like or akin to a romantic torture chamber of high christian pantheons, purgatory for the crusaders.. candles and germanic flavours, dripping seething with the turnng of the river, damp bricks.... rich tomberic German accents.... a place to unwind..... with atmosphere............. A castle of epic proportion, a testiment to extreme wealth, churches stuffed with the brazoned bones of dead saints and monstrous lesions of gold, icons to the mythic past of blood, sacrifice, and power over the unpowerful.

As Kafka said of Prague " this mother has claws"

a prosaic journey through time and space is about to take place, in your mind and in the soul, it will evoke searing images on your fragile mind, but alas will they be false, can i describe to a degree exatly what i saw, or will i be deluded my self, have i forgotten, for only i saw it the way i did, you will see and definately imagine something different, for no two men are the same, and at the bottom we know this, but to appreciate a tasty beer after a commercialised flight, to taste the liberty of dirt and and air, this is common ground! my non existent phantomatic cell combinations!!! this is amsterdam!! brussels was quaint and pandering to all bourgeois tastes, including seafood and civic blandness, but alas it was unoffensive to the sensibilty of a miscreant! this miscreant tis not me but Brendan Sharp, an evil spy sent from the planet yulos, providing man with street poetry, pseudo racist obervations, insightful architectural faints, copious amounts of laughter, inaudible intellectalisations on things as variet as the impossibility of home made gravity kits and the visualisation of the naked popeye serending jesus on tin rafts! he is a random man, but true invention is but the art of the liar, but i do not lie i never lie, to write is to be truthful, though everyone know lies spout forth when i speak! but this is a different world! ok Dour festival was hot and sweaty, baked alive in a human box of death called a tent, moles tried to dig above us, french bums jumped us, but we never yielded! we danced into the small hours, danced and laughed and spent days swimming in an azore quarry filled with the freedom of young kissable youth, grotesque dead trees grew upwards out of the cold water, i decended the deadness into the darkness, the contrast between laughter and silence, this awful dead trunk, the blindness, and then when the lungs and brain coerce me, air action and stunning blue colour, a true oasis in the Belgian countryside! to Cologne at six in the morning no passport needed, a huge beamoth of a cathedral , strange sculptures, ice cream whilst dipping my toes in the Rhine, railways, cargo ships, sculptures, lovely bars with eccentric features, conversation with our hostel friends whilst drunk.... lying upside down in the warm wind at night, intoxicated the cathedral became a huge obstacle, a seperation between me and the sky, i wanted it to fly off and never return, to become something exotic and fantastic.... but alas it was still there.. a monument to a great and hideous lie............. but i laugh still...... i love still..... i live......

well as no one no longer reads these fabled pages of the phantomatic word; and the reflection on my new moments and snipets of consciousness that they procreate with, i dictate that i have a journal to myself, a record of preserving myself and my emotions vis a vis travel, on a system that could survive our current Zeitgeist of budget travel and commodifyed experience, into a realm of a newer more brutal brutality, think Inca, think Aboriginal, think west, think again,what exicitement and new found horrors lay ahead!! truly wonderfully ghastly!! it is to be a man, to have the liberty as i have, right now in England and the world! And so it becomes that i acknowledge Blake when he suggests that there is no collective consciousness, just millions of indepedent minds, each with a indivdual consciousness acting to their own volition, experience becomes something highly original, spectacular infinity! such as i find it so!!!! And with a cheerful boast and no money i head to the Scottish island of Rum to toast the night, and sleep o'er vales and under stars! they, who rejoice at the dark delights of thine eyes! as we gaze at each other against the ark of time.

On a sunny morning in January, i awoke and walked the several footsteps to a small port, along the way i thought about the upcoming day, its tribulations, the loneliness of sitting on modern sea vessels alone, the indifferent sea, the beauty i was about to endure.. would it be too much for the weakness of morning. alas no... the sun shined on my arkward features, illuminating me.. a sea God smiled down from his axis of portal rock, his face of stone unchanged... for it were only Tangier, but this was my first trip to Africa, Where the colours of excess and tribulation... combine with the tumult of history....... to haunt the mind.... one can't escape the errings... Africa is the heart of it all..........but nay Tangiers, many a bum has washed himself to its bosomed carcass.. its where Burroughs wasted himself, ragamuffins stole, women toasted their sorrow! criminals, spies, international zone, opium, pirates.... illegals..... a decayed mystique.. a suitable place to start then... Tarifa in Spain is one of those unique places where the land and sea merge so that you can see yourself as if soaring above, your place on earth at that time easily marked.... you can see where the Atlantic coast of Iberia bends and makes verticalism with Africa, forming that inland sea... Mediterranean: Mediterraneus Middle Land Sea.. From Tarifa you leave south and west away from the kissing lovers, and arrive fifty minutes later..., Tangier, bustling with labyrinth alleyways, creaked faces poking from hollows, curry spices, a cacaphonous symphony of sound beckons around, klaxons, bartering, fish markets, iron mongers, metal gridings.... decrepid colonial buildings, the esteem of fading granduer, the rot........ exotic and entrancing to a fool like me, an outsider from beginning to end... perhaps even.... an innocent abroad? interesting.......

in short i have been on this jaunt mindful of the consternation i have for bad english weather; as it is dastardly and terrible, especially in the way it instigates the passage of pie into my mouth and causes the inches of my hithertho well formed waist to expand. somewhere lurks dark lunar musings. anyway Sevilla was pleasant enough, nice and temperate, tapas, beer , the alcazar, the giralda, lovely islamic gardens, the smell of spring, orange groves and piff tiff walks by the river, pause serial number d55650 and tosh and off to gibralter which is seemingly and inplausibly existing under British traditions, traditions which quickly disspated my excitement as i crossed the runway in the night, only to be confronted by mothercare, motherfucker! more like, the resident apes were all drinking in the local pubs and cheering on manchester city, tax dodging man city barbary macaques! the whole lot of yers... however the apes on the rock were charming and inqusitive lil scamps plus they only attacked me three times, me thinks the plastic bag full of bananas and muffins was a bit silly on my part te hah, so i came down from the mount to the half way moon and cable station where i lay down, back to the vertical drop below the ramp, and face gazing up and the cliffs, full of raptors, gulls and other noisy birds, a piece of metaphysical manna, then i desend into Tarifa for beautiful sunsets, soothing winds, greek takeaways, singing birds and views over to Morroco, which i visited today on what was possibly the most exciting few hours of my small bastard life, chapter to follow..............