Living for Disco

OK. Breathe. We’re staying at the Hilton in Delhi, because the hotel we were booked into is clearly a brothel, as well as obviously being in close proximity to a mosquito* breeding centre from which the entire mosquito population has escaped. This being high season, the Hilton is the only hotel with rooms. Bummer.

Today is the first day that we’ve stopped moving for over a week. We’ve taken 6 internal flights, one overnight train and several extremely long car journeys. I’ve seen all over India, from Mysore to Calcutta, and beyond. Yesterday we were in the terrorist hotspot of Guwahati in Assam – there are no words to describe the beauty of this place, and the poverty. Guwahati is a town of 1.1 million people, 20,000 of whom are child labourers. I met one of them – a 15 year old boy with cornea problems who worked in a tea-shop. His ambition, now that he can see, is to open his own tea-shop in a couple of years. He is the only breadwinner in his family. His father can’t speak, his mother has too look after his two younger siblings. The day before we arrived, the tea-shop burnt down.

I’ve met some inspirational people as well. In Andhra Pradesh, we visited a school and hospital set up by a man who lost his wife and two young children in the sabotaged Air India crash in 1985. He came to Kakinada, where his parents in law lived, and started a school for working children. Now there’s a school for over 100 kids, and a truly impressive eye hospital.

In Mysore, we met a group of doctors who, disenchanted with the money-obsessed environment of modern medicine, moved to a widly remote area 20 years ago in order to provide healthcare to displaced tribal people. They’ve knit themselves so tightly into the community that even if they wanted to leave they couldn’t. They run two schools for tribal children, together with a health centre providing free and subsidised healthcare to anyone who needs it.

I’m in awe.

Will have to go on about the gift extravaganza later. Suffice to say that I will have to leave the enormous hats, brass prayer offering plates and large carved wooden rhino out of my luggage on the trip home. Honestly, you couldn’t have put together a collection of less portable stuff for as welcome gifts for the weary traveller.

Also, we spent the last two days in the back of a car with a guy who believes that to speak to someone on a mobile phone, you have to shout as if you are trying to convey urgent messages across the alps. My eardrums have suffered, but they will find their reward in heaven.

Adios my friends. I’m going shopping.

*I have discovered that I am allergic to mosquito bites. I happened to get bitten while visiting the hospital in Mysore, and my arse swelled up into giant lumpy boils. Had to have an antihistemine shot in the bum, which knocked me out for a good two hours.

We arrived. We didn’t fall out of the sky or crash into anyone else. The check in procedure at Terminal 4 was so shambolic that we almost missed the flight, despite arriving at the requisite time, but that’s BA for you. No time to do any lovely duty free shopping. Only a mad dash to the gate, and an undignified scramble into my seat as I had to climb over the snoring gentleman in the aisle seat to get to it.

Still, once we were safely catapulted skywise, I had my fill of bloody marys, and managed to watch 3 and a half rubbish films; an achievement of which I feel justifiably proud.

Apart from that, I haven’t seen much yet, apart from some sacred cows chewing the cud in the airport carpark and some very dodgy driving.

This is my last day of freedom before I’m launched into a whirl of journeys and meetings. It’s not very hot, but the sun is out. I’m going to go and lie by the pool.

I’m going to India in five days, and I’m getting a bit concerned about the flight. In an attempt to see if I could do anything about my fear of flying, I searched the web, and eventually found this site.

Aha! I thought. It’s called Airsafe.com – it’ll tell me not to worry and that my foolish fears are groundless. Be off with you, it’ll say, with a light punch on the arm. You’re a one! Fear of flying? Pish – you may as well be afraid of bubble gum*.

But no. Instead I find myself reading about mid-air collisions, ‘fatal turbulence events’ and explosions on board. All of my worst fears put down into black and white. I haven’t yet read the page entitled “Most fatalities”, but imagine my horror when I read about the incident where a man sustained mortal injuries from an in-flight entertainment screen. Thank God BA have got the screens in the backs of the seats; I’m going to pop a valium, knock back a couple of Bloody Marys and watch my selection of films, comfortable in the slightly fuzzy knowledge that the entertainment system isn’t about to attack me, and maul me to death**. That’s if we manage not to fall out of the sky, or hit another plane on take-off.

What’s this website for? Hmmm? Who in their right mind would direct someone with a phobia of being airborne to a site like this?

Excuse me while I skulk off to the bathroom for a bout of quiet hysteria.

*Which, as any fule kno, is a potential choking hazard
**I’ll be taken by surprise, having been lulled into a false sense of security, when the headphones attempt to strangle me.

I have to go to the doctor next week, to get some jabs and some valium for the trip – one for my general health reasons, the other to save the sanity of everyone else on the flight with me.

I loathe my doctor. Just thinking about him makes me nauseous. He’s made me cry both times I’ve been to see him, and he refuses to either look at me or touch me (thank Christ). I think he hates women. Really. His voice on the phone sounds like a million slugs crawling down the wires. It slithers. My skin is still crawling from making the appointment just now.

Stupidly, once I realised that he was both incompetent and inhuman, I tried to change doctors. I didn’t realise that all the doctors in the Lewisham area (and believe me, I spoke tearfully and desperately to all 40 of them) are full up, and have waiting lists. Mine is one of the few that has spare patient places, and bitter experience has shown me why. What happens to people who can’t get a doctor? Do they spend their lives going to A&E whenever they’ve got a problem?

I’ve become resigned to this man now because I’m pretty healthy, and flatmate has put the house up for sale, so I’ll be moving soon. I’m not really very excited about next week though. I don’t know how he’s going to administer my tetanus shot without coming into physical contact with me. Maybe he’ll ask his grey and downtrodden receptionist to do it. In fact, I think I might prefer that.

I’ve managed to flood the living room of my downstairs neighbours. Flatmate removed the grout from around the edge of the bath yesterday, and this seems to have resulted in a nice little conduit for excess shower water. They kindly showed me the bit of the ceiling where the paper had come away, and the not inconsiderable puddle of water in which their yucca plant now stands.

They’re very nice – the flat’s just been sold, and they have to leave in a couple of weeks. They wanted to let me know, just in case the new people object to the surprise addition of impromptu water-features to their interior decor. They may have a point.

Still, flatmate is in the process of deciding whether or not to put this flat on the market and bugger off to South America for six months to learn Spanish. Chances of her doing it are 99%, so I will be homeless again come April.

I don’t seem to be the settling type. The longest I’ve lived anywere in this uncompromising city is 2 years, when my ex and I shared a flat in New Cross. Since then, I’ve been packing and unpacking on a regular basis. When I was working as a tour leader, I packed and unpacked every couple of days, and ended up sleeping on floors all over London whenever I was back here. By the time I got back, I was usually desperate for a glass of Chardonnay and a girly giggle to counteract the months drinking wine made by “The Syrian Grape Processing Company” (yes, it was as bad as it sounds). And it was nice to have some female company too – I rarely got to meet any Arab women. I worked almost exclusively with men. It was not always easy trying to ellicit co-operation from alot of them. I think I did OK though.

I don’t want to get up and go again. I like this flat. I like my life right now. If I move again, I want to move somewhere new and exciting, where I can see different stars at night, and where I can learn a new language. I’m torn between settling and pinging off like a rubber band, boucing off new worlds and new people. I don’t think I’ll ever be free of the travel bug.

(As an aside, that reminds me of a conversation I had with a French woman in Egypt once. She asked me why I was doing the job, and I said I had caught the travel bug. She looked horrified, and I sought to reassure her that I was not suffering from ‘Egypt Surprise’, but had a love of travel. “No, No”, I said, “I’ve just got itchy feet”. Well, I didn’t see her for dust.)

Sigh. Well – we’ll see, won’t we? That’s one thing about life – you never know what might happen,