Empty Monkey (Dot Com) - The real-time story of how the book is written

The words I see upon this page
Are written in a way I know
Confusion there is none, nor rage
Because the words all seem to flow
I think I understand them.

What they mean is clear to see
And if some word like “think” appears
I think I know it means for me
I think I think I know the gears
Of my mind are engaged. (more…)

Kal’s song.
How have you opened my sleeping mind
Why is the light so warm in your eyes
What have I done to meet someone so kind
Where can I go when we’ve said our goodbyes.

The bush-taxi lurches off the tarmac onto a dirt track, bucking and swaying like a small boat fighting against a rough sea, the old Mercedes diesel engine labouring as we plough through sand filled gullies, then cruising along hard-baked rippled clay that threatens to shake every nut and bolt of the old bus loose. An intense blue sky blends into the flat yellow horizon, from which a settlement, mud-brick dwellings camouflaged in the parched semi-desert appears. We thread our way through the village. Our driver squeezes together two bared wires protruding from the almost disassembled dashboard. This I realise sounds the horn that clears goats, chickens, dogs and children from the track. I lose count of the villages we pass in this way, each one named after its founder, but as anonymous to us as the mountains of the moon. I have a privileged position, one of three passengers up-front next to the driver. The other twenty-three passengers are squeezed into a space designed for fifteen. Taking a sip from a bottle of mineral water I then mop my brow with an already sopping handkerchief and think of rainy English winters, especially the one we had just escaped from, where my companion had talked me into helping her look into the possibility of starting a charity. Seemed a good idea at the time – find a village, buy a plot, get a couple of buildings erected, open a home for orphans, rent out rooms to visitors to pay it’s way. Sounds simple when you say it quickly, but knowing Carole, she will find a way. (more…)

Well – well, quite an interesting day.

We had Xmas lunch at Nick’s.
We arrived an hour early and were met by Roy, an old friend of Mandy’s, I had said to Mandy ages ago that he was so mean-spirited, obnoxious and rude, that I would never visit again if he was there, but to hell with it, season of good-will and all that, so I asked Carol to be nice to him, talk to his dog and let me help Nick in the kitchen.

He was not rude to us. (more…)

Names have a strange power, they convey something more than the letters of the name, the sound of the name, the look of the written word, or the historical connotations. They mean something more than the word itself.
Who could be fearful of Alan-the-Hun? (talking of names, the name for ‘tartare-sauce’ in Polish looks like a familiar English ‘cream-cheese’ - but I assure you - it tastes awful on crispbread, I have just made that mistake, so ’sound-alike-names’ can be misunderstood). (more…)

This crazy project finally got it’s act together this afternoon.
Last night, quite late, I wound up in ‘Harris Jazz Bar’ in Old Krakow main square.
By the time I arrived, only one bar-stool remained unoccupied. Squeezing in, I sat down and looked around to see if Dr. Reimes was there.
He was not, probably gone back to Berlin. Yesterday, he had introduced himself to me, and an interesting conversation ensued where we jumped from Baroque music to Jazz to Greek history to Hitler by way of atomic physics and particle accelerators, the design of which he was involved in for the German government. Not the sort of guy one expects to meet in a Jazz cellar. But strange things have been happening to me ever since I arrived in Poland. (more…)