a side street in Paris

Coach drivers are a funny lot, technically they travel far and wide, negotiating towns and cities all over Europe. By rights they should be brimming with local knowledge and travellers tales but coach drivers are cut from a different cloth. At least the average British coach driver is.

With this in mind I bring you the tale of Bob who parked up his coach on a side street in Paris. Having dropped his passengers he drove out of central Paris and found a nice empty road to park in. After tidying the inside he locked up the coach and started walking back into Paris itself. Some hours passed, perhaps he had a coffee in a café, more likely he asked for tea and was disappointed by its quality and lack of hobnob. Who can say, but after a time he decided to head back to his coach. Problem was he couldn’t remember where he parked it. He wondered around the vast metropolis of Paris for some time, presumably wishing he had brought the map with him until exasperated and running low on ideas he called his boss.

The conversation has been passed down to me but apparently it went thus.

“Um I can’t find my coach”

“Where did you park it?”

“Down a side street”

“What was the name of the street?”

“Well it was Rue d’ something”

Please add your own expletives. Since Bob still worked for the company when I arrived on the scene we can only imagine that he found it eventually.

Take me to a gay bar!

In 1994 I was an 18 years old. Standing on the platform of a station in rural Hampshire I awaited the commuter train to London. I was off to see my cousin. It was my first time into London on my own and the first time I had met up with him without the accompaniment of my grandparents. This was the start of the most memorable day of my life, it was the day I ceased to be green.

Two things, one, my cousin is gay, two, I didn’t really understand fully what this entailed and three (small gag to check you are still focused) up until then I’d only ever witnessed the sanitised version of his life but had little to no appreciation of this fact at all. Sliding into Waterloo James was waiting to meet me.

Casually he mentioned it was John’s 27^th birthday and they were going out to a club that night then having a party after in his flat. The anxiety started to build in my stomach. John? No one had mentioned boyfriends before. I tried to imagine what John might look like, would he be wearing a frock? Is that how these types of relationships worked? Frankly if one of them had to expose there knees it really aught not to be James. As the afternoon unfolded ahead of me I learned that cross-dressing wasn’t actually an integral part of gay relationships, that gay people frequented different clubs, clubs a little more aligned to their needs and that I was extremely scared.

I was terrified in fact, really terrified. It was the complete unknown and the only imagery at my disposal was the warped over the top imaginings in my head. I feared everything same sex kissing, cross-dressing, any signs of affection or flirtation and loads of other stuff I didn’t even know existed. Sure I was fine with the whole gay thing on paper but the prospect of meeting it all in its glorious, flamboyant and unabashed reality tore at my stomach like a possessed tiger.

So I did what any self-respecting 18 year old would do. I hit the bottle. Not just any bottle, I hit James’s bottle of vodka nestled amongst the other spirits on the sideboard. That night we would be going to one of the biggest gay bars in London and then to a party afterwards, at the same place I would be staying at. There was nowhere to hide, I was hitting this fear head on I needed to be as numb as possible.

The Vauxhall Tavern in South London had boarded up windows to prevent people throwing bricks through them. You might say that from the outside it lacked immediate appeal. I arrived with my cousin and as we stepped through the entrance, I was engulfed by the scene that lay before me. The door was slightly raised and from my vantage point I surveyed a huge crowd of men, men as far as the eye could see just loads and loads of men. Over to the right there was a bar and to the left at the back a stage showing a drag act. In this split second I lost James to the crowd. Franticly I scanned for him, my face must have been a picture of pure fear because the bouncer on the door pointed me towards a waving James standing at the bar. We got drinks and then he led me to a table full of his friends.

I don’t remember all that happened that night, just snippets that point towards a general relaxing and then pure delirious joy. I remember one of James friends holding my hand so that I didn’t feel left out. I remember dancing lots, I was chatted up by a bisexual guy who was Welsh. Who knew Welsh people could be gay too? I remember storming into the ladies toilet and finding it full of men. Infuriated by their audacity I shouted/slurred “this is the ladies toilet, get out!” and to my surprise they did just that and drained from the room like frightened snakes. I remember the drag show, and I most remember leaving long after my cousin and John had returned home accompanied by to of James’s friends apparently tasked with the job.

By the end of the day nothing mattered anymore. The fears that once seemed so scary seemed so incomprehensibly absurd as the night wore on. No doubt it was the alcohol but these fears never returned. When I hear people talking about their disgust or disapproval of gay people I feel sorry for them and their evident childlike naivety. I wish they too could have had a night like mine.

I delight in the occasional affirmation that we are, in fact, all the same. Its strange really given that my love of travel stems from a hatred of the self satisfied sameness we find ourselves wallowing in, contained in the borders that surround us and otherwise known as national identity.

This is a different type of similarity. The sameness that thrills me comes from somewhere much deeper, a core inherent instinctive thing that unites us all and in this way makes a mockery of the myths and bogus traditions that we repeat like a mantra to ourselves in order to find comfort for our insecurities and a division between us, (locals) and them, (foreigners).

In 2000 I went to China. I made it to Yangshuo via public transport armed only with an out of date guidebook, which was all but useless, and a phrase book whose phrases were impossible to read or pronounce. Fortunately I had the naivety and arrogance of youth on my side.

My aim had been to ‘get away from other travellers’ I didn’t want to hang out with a bunch of guys I met in a hostel, a collection of the very same set of nationals you could meet anywhere and all of whom are delighted by their own ability to reconvene in a different part of the world from the one they started in. Huddling together they can hang out in bars and have the good fortune not to need to talk to any of the local people whose country they had travelled so far to get to. That had been my aim, however by the time I reached Yangshuo on my bumpy, confusing, bewildering, utterly unplanned and downright foolhardy 3 day journey from Hong Kong I fell at the feet of the first foreigner person to speak English to me, It had been a tough 3 days, I won’t lie.

Thing is, I thought I’d got the whole travelling thing sussed. I had travelled around the world; I’d covered South East Asia, Australia, America, Canada by god I’d even been to Rome I thought I knew a thing or two. I didn’t. By entering China unguided I had rendered myself dumb and illiterate, it was only my ability to draw things (chickens) for dinner (buses) for transport and (toilets) for other business that I got anywhere at all. I could have turned and run but I’m stubborn like that.

Several moments stand out, for example I arrived on a bus into Guangzhou the day I left Hong Kong. Clearly we had entered a bus station, but there were two marked on my utterly useless map. The most useless map imaginable it had street names written in the Roman alphabet and these in no way correlated with the Chinese script that adorned the actual road signs on the jumble of busy city streets that surrounded me. Standing in a now deserted bus station clutching a shit map and loaded up with all my luggage, alone, a mighty long way from home, in the mist of a cultural system which made little or no sense to me, I did what I have since done several times and has stood me largely in mighty good stead. I turned right.

Striding along with a confidence that I in no way felt I had decided to give right a try and if this didn’t work out move on to left for a while then perhaps up and then down. Luckily I didn’t require any of the other directions, having walked for several minutes in a right bearing through a sea of Chinese signs with my heart in my mouth, I saw a sign I recognised. It said ‘Tourist Information’.

Finally I reached Yangshuo a popular travellers destination due to its unusual traffic bollard shaped mountains. A typical road might consist of several houses in a row punctuated by a mountain. I’d met some fellow foreigners in a café in town. A French girl and I hired a couple of bikes and we ventured out into the country to survey the unusual scenery. As we cycled we started passing young children making their way home from school. First a couple then a few more then a huge stream of kids flowed past us and as they did they shouted “Ni Hao!” or “Hello!” and waved at us the funny looking strangers. On and on this went and we smiled shouted and waved back, at a seemingly endless line. Finally towards the end we encountered two small boys, they regarded us in much the same manner as the others but instead yelled “Fuck you!” with a cheeky grin. But of course what’s the first thing a small boy asks an English speaker to teach them how to say? anything rude! We laughed so hard we nearly fell off our bikes.