132 Esplanade
                                                                                                      Sumner
                                                                                                      Christchurch
                                                                                                      once upon a
time ....... That’s how it starts, and I knew you’d want a zany beginning, ‘cause these letters are few and far between. Of course the Esplanade is not all that zany, on Sumner Sundays, it is cornets and cream along and down the front but nevertheless there are other moments when the surf arcs onto an empty beach and those evening walks remind you why you are here. Being winter and too cold and old to swim, it is the shimmer of moonlight, or the crashing spray at night that captivates. And the acres of sand rippling away, driftwood and seaweed. Such simple romance.

Writing (fiction that is, the dreaming of what there is not) is for the time being put on hold. Abandoning theme and gist for prattle. The only message now is you found the bottle. Have I written this before? Which makes you the unwitting unlucky recipient of the bruised forefingers desire to bash. Them damn keys. I remember when I got my first typewriter. A big old Imperial with a colonial past. My uncle took me upstairs one day, an unheard of event for my aunt dealt with all the mundane arrangements like clothes and sheets, when term started, a death in the family. My uncle is a distant figure, an insistently sexist master of charm. He never moved with the times and in general found it unnecessary to greatly change his chauvinist attitudes. It was almost as though, having got to fifty before all this equality of sexes blew up, he decided he could see it out. I honestly don’t think he could have adapted but he didn’t even try and moderate it, just breezed on, admiring women, praising women, and I found out more recently ruffling their skirts. Exercising an option I never thought practical. So when he took me upstairs and gave me his old typewriter it was a significant moment. Not just some cheap and nasty, thirty like them, in some progressive classroom. There was no question of learning a practical skill, this was life, something deep. This was the real McCoy, and I learnt to double hit most of the capitals before I moved to two fingers. And so when I think about this writing malarkey which is a word much softer in the head than on the paper (like me right now) I think of that dark long bedroom in a house by the forest with lead diamond shaped windows on which the ivy used to scratch a taunt at night, while its shadows formed men on my bedroom wall, men leaning forward off ladders struggling with prising the half open catches. It gives a little terror. Which somehow isn’t a proper sentence. It’d be nice to be imaginative like a novelist would and say a little about the Imperial, because my uncle was British colonial governor of Christmas Island once. There are more than one, this was a speck caught in the eye of the Indian Ocean, a kind of paradise job with natives, and I can be pretty sure that for a while the typewriter constituted one of the more significant capital assets of the Foreign Office. A machine that banged out history, the kind researchers find to confirm a theory, not the real stuff. But it would all be soapsuds round the edge. It’s the double hit capitals I remember.

And enjoying writing a letter for the first time in my life. Typewriters seduced me into the mechanical age the way bicycles do for other people though I never really learnt to ride with my feet on the handlebars. Wordprocessors make me lower my eyelids at the techno traumas. They get in under the skin and you itch away at that blinking cursor. Which prompts a thought about writing a letter – does the recipient feel duty bound to read it. That’s you. A captured audience for scribblers who should have gone to bed. The double-hitters nocturnal club. Which is all very well when you’re travelling. News from ‘home’, the old drizzle from afar. But what of now, when man, well the pressures. Are you mixing your lettuce with your ladylove, how is your time spilt or spent? Maybe you’ve persuaded her the long trip up the salad aisles will be profitably rewarding. I was thinking before that you were still at college, dawdling in the cloistered courtyards on your way to a lecture by a man who knows. Wondering if you had time to read all this crap, stuffing it in your pocket for later.

Anyway you know what I’ll say at the end. I always do these days.

Which are strange. Like living in a vacuum. Inbetween days. Between what was and what will be. I’ve lived in quite a few inbetween days, but up to now they’ve been leading up to certain ‘uncertain futures’, whereas now ....they themselves are uncertain. Because you don’t know when the deadline is. It’s like the long essay, or the Phd but even more so. There are things you have to do, the laundry and acquiring some knowledge, but no horizon, no destination. And you wonder if you’re doing it just because it’s there. ‘Cause it’s hardly Everest, the Gloucester Rd launderette. But this is just an ambling preamble. A warning before you get stuck in, take a night off the piss and get down right comfortable to coming to no conclusion.

I’m wary of letters, I take the risk with you. You write your own versions. I know there won’t be search parties out, analysts stalking Sumner bay. But I wrote once to friends, a scrawling letter from Antonio’s jukebox on Ios, the day after tripping. And I quoted bits of jukebox songs which were guru words then, and they all buttoned up. Doug’s gone crazy. Which I had. But they weren’t supposed to realize, they were meant to groove. They failed miserably, joining Coutts in Oxford St. Shifting money. Big money. Mostly other peoples, which was a shame because among them was an arrogant enough actor who only acts now to the tune of Japanese orders. Mixes his metaphors in triplicate Fax. On the thirty third floor in the air. Joni’s Room 101. (Now there’s a interpretation challenge).

My mother writes increasingly long descriptions of breakfasts, the high point of a Norwegian travel diary, and I am loath to follow in these literarily damning habits, but roasted kumera stuffed fat with butter and avocado sandwiches... we are talking gastronomic heaven if dietary hell. Her letters (remembering what I was talking about), are like seeing Coronation Street on the telly down here. It isn’t the content, but the haunting theme music of her handwriting, nothing specific, just Bet at the bar and most of a lifetime ebbing away. I’m tempted to think of her letters as milestones, regular information taking me along. But if life’s a journey, they’re more like streetlights, coming in clusters, recently as villages and towns, building back towards the deluging city of my boarding school youth. But they will never quite make it there. Because the secret is out, honesty reared it’s head in a London caff on a February day. Suky told my Dad I didn’t believe. That chap God. And he told my mum. Simple thing honesty. You can spend a whole lifetime evading it, and then puff... like getting caught with a fag. Even though I was leaning out of the window. In Kathmandu at the time.

So now they know for sure which is different from smelling it on the breath. I don’t know what it was, but that week in Feb was the honestmost point of my travels and therefore quite possibly my life. As it was for Suky. Both of us, independently and then together. Now why is that? What was stripped away, not inhibitions surely. I wore them right through Asia, a belt round my middle in case of thieves, never even took them off for a swim. But I think for a moment I put my insecurities aside. We both did, and they wrinkled briefly in the Kathmandu sun. Eventually we dusted them off, gave them a good wash, and brought them back up nearly clean, as good as before. Which means amongst other things that I haven’t followed up Suky’s pioneering stuff with the father (that art...) as I intended then. Which will leave the hurt, the wound where the knife went in. But I don’t want either to turn it or stitch it right now. These being the days inbetween.

Suky meantime is back into erroneous underwear and gadding about on her cripple clogs. Staying occasionally in loungelike bedrooms in Gumboot town. Where the cultured Kiwis, having been abroad, know that in good hotels you get a chocolate placed on your pillow to stick to your ear. And replenished if necessary. A bit more of the insame. Like hearing recent Jethro Tull, it sounds familiar and you recognize the voice. Is progress digging a bigger hole or looking over the top. The thing is the longer you spend in the hole the more like home it becomes. And what are all those shapes outside. Are they strange fascinating creatures or just fossils? Or specters? Like Phil? These days I play some old-time music from the Singing Detective. Potter’s advantage, which sounds like a bag of compost for early mulching, was that he got used to betrayal early on. With the confidence of youth and an unambiguous class battle to fight. And talent. My problem was not having that and being a middle class guy wanting to be working class fighting for the right to be middle class. Too simply complicated. I was what I aspired to without the fight. You’ve got to be angry they told me at Arvon, the knocking shop for pissed off romantics stuck out on the moors. Go sit in a shed and get angry. It’s a fact. But I have a problem with heads. Like pants, I only ever get into my own.

Which makes writing difficult, what with other peoples seeming more interesting. So for a while, I’m taking down the flag. Wrapping it neatly round the disembodied corpse, and pushing it over the edge. Out to sea. Past the surfers and canoeists. And this bottle is just for old times sake. Because I can’t quite stop. I don’t know where I learnt continuous self-assessment from, I was always an exam kid me. I forgive my bad memory on the grounds that I was taught that way. Saving up knowledge for the day to forget it. Left now with the gut reaction to spew when it’s already sicked up.

Take as red all the questions. Or are the Tories infiltrated even into sociology departments these days. And what’s this worrying interest in politics. You’ll be heading down the tube man, or worse still onto it. Phoning your brother collect? Stay wary? It’s a sweet smelling jungle, cause the leeches are smothered in Cardin. Just remember whose labour the share marketers are sharing.

We are searching desperately for some NZ grass. Not the sort they turn into mutton and wool, but the taller stems that occasionally turn into headlines. We’ve identified a target, a small almost ex-wwoof community near Oxford. Initial research revealed such little farming activity that we figure it’s a good bet. And they smiled. And if not, there’s a few animals to look at who’ll look back so we’ll head down there on Friday. Cruise down in the Cortina. A this decade model. The envy of your average Kiwi who’s busy updating the Morris Minor for a seventiesmobile. No, the cars are wonderful. I never thought I’d see an Anglia again. When I was eight my cousin in Newcastle had one, the summer he was an ice-cream man in Whitley Bay. And when Suky’s gran learnt to drive, terrifying the Goldhurst terrace residents at the age of seventy, what other car was there. Anglias, Ford Prefects, big old Falcons and Holdens, it’s a nostalgic moviemakers dream. I’ve got the cars, who’s got the script. Not me brother.

We don’t know what we’re going to do yet. I’m keeping hold of all the electric plugs I’m changing – they haven’t a high resale value down here. If I was playing poker, I’d be stacking a side bid on the road again. Waiting for a real neat hand. There’s a café in Pokhara I meant to call back into maybe... we left in a rush. And once you start of(f) course, there’s continents lining up. Take my poor secretarial skills to show the Dictators of South MacDonalds. I think though that nexttime, if it happens at all, it’ll be without a timescale. With an ear to the wind, blowing. Itineraries move you along so fast, you end up catching that last plane too soon. Winding up when you’ve just wound down.

Asia twisted my mind, tweaked my nose, but thankfully steered clear of my stomach. When it finally let go of my head, I was left with an abiding impression. They need to develop. Revolutionary huh? They need to develop, but oh so much more do we need to slow down. Otherwise they haven’t a monkeys. The west will fuck them (even literally as in Thailand), exploit them, and then move on, creaming down the road, looking for another little Paradise to wrap up and get on the shelves. I’ve gone on too long, I knew it’d get heavy. Life’s full of surprises like who’s in the Wimbledon final this year. So instead of the David longy letter I was going to write, hence the tortuous beginning which last almost to here, this is the end. All Floyd out, no more to say. Been nice talking to you. Go get rat-arsed. Letters (English) are for burning. Go ahead.