THE ONSET OF WINTER

Beneath a sour milk sky the rain makes rivers of the tram lines cut into the street outside our hostel. The door clicks behind us and, with collars upturned against the lazy wind, we plunge into the grey light of Prague’s late autumn dawn. Weighed down with heavy packs we trudge through the marshland of puddles in the uneven sidewalk, our feet soaking and drizzle in our eyes. Cold rain runs down the inside of my shirt, trickling down my back. At the tram stop we shelter in the doorway of an apartment building and wait for the Number 5 to come and take us to the bus terminal. The unrelenting gloom of this dismal morning is compounded by the grim faced facades of the cold war era low-rise tenements standing across the road from where we wait. Winter is closing in. It’s time to go.

The persistent northward trajectory of our travels hastened winter’s onset; every new city providing more evidence that the year is dieing away beneath us. It seemed like every time we stepped off a train it was two points colder than it had been when we boarded and the welcome mat of autumn leaves became thicker and thicker with each fresh slog to a new hostel. Final confirmation came the night we arrived in Budapest and the clocks went back an hour. By the time we reached Prague an unrelenting drizzle had set in and night was falling at 5pm.

I flew back into London yesterday to find the old girl in the same state in which I’d left her; crowded, grim and over priced. I love this city. I dropped off my bags at my old home and went for a run along the rain-swollen Thames. In a few spots the river had broken its banks and at one point I had to wade through the freezing, knee-deep water lapping against the garden walls of the riverfront homes along Chiswick Walk. On the south side, on the muddy track that runs between the river and the wetlands, a following breeze picked up the loose leaves blanketing the path and whisked them along at my feet. For about 100 metres I ran with a black and yellow escort tumbling and swirling around me. The only sound to be heard was the rustle of leaves and the rhythmic squelch and crunch of my soggy running shoes slapping on the gravel. And I had that feeling you sometimes get when running of absolute elation. I don’t know if it’s the result of endorphins exploding in your head or brain cells dying from lack of oxygen but it’s an incredible sensation – something like invincibility – and without effort your pace quickens and the ground passes beneath you as if it were moving in the opposite direction. There’s nothing but you, the air you’re breathing and the track in front of you. And the static lifts and, fleetingly, you’re left with nothing but total mental silence; a complete absence of any conscious thought at all. I’d be willing to run every day of the year if it guaranteed just two seconds of that feeling.

Not happy with spending the past eight weeks living out of each other’s pockets Joe and I celebrated the termination of the tour last night by heading out to a concert. We went to see Seu Jorge at the Round House in Camden. He’s an awesome Brazilian musician who’s probably best known here as the man who did acoustic covers of Dave Bowie songs in Portuguese for the film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The soundtrack to that film is a bit of a favourite of mine but the quality of that album doesn’t reveal even a tiny portion of how dazzling Jorge is live. I’ve been to better concerts but I don’t think I’ve ever been to one where I’ve had more fun. The energy of his music and the enthusiasm of his twelve-piece samba band – not to mention the dancing of the pretty Brazilian girls – made it a pretty damn good night out. If you get a chance to see this dude play live take it.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson