Travel Biography - Week 1.

Since I started writing for this Blogger page, there have been several readers who have either asked me or suggested that I write a book about my travel experience. However, there are a couple of problems with this idea. First, are there enough experiences in my life to fill a book with, for example, 326 pages, the exact number took up by Simon Reeve's travel biography, Step by Step? Indeed, Reeve had some extraordinary life experiences which were very unique for an individual who never attended a public school, nor ever seen the inside of a university - the normal steps taken by any average journalist, especially one who hosts his own TV documentaries.

Simon Reeve.

The second problem is the extreme difficulty in getting the book published, especially without the aid of an agency. As I said in an earlier blog, most aspiring authors have their manuscripts winging their way back to them after rejection from a publisher. The same goes for journalism, especially on TV and the fame that comes with it. It's a profession nigh impossible to get into. Therefore, having developed a desire to write a biography on my travel experience out of encouragement from others, I hope that I will make an effort here on this Blogger page which will result in an enjoyable read.

It will also be noted that many of these events featured in this series have had a mention, even several times, before now. Therefore, as I intend to highlight more of the background on which these events occurred, I hope to create a more coherent picture - the one showing that my travel experiences are intricately linked with my Christian faith.

The Beginning - Growing up.

I was born at Westminster Hospital in London on September 16th, 1952, to Gaetano and Laura Blasi, both full-blood Italians who met at a post-war Italian community at the Barbican and married a few months later in 1951. As the story goes, when Mum was giving birth to me, two weeks past her delivery date, it was said that an English midwife at the delivery ward cursed us for being "foreigners" settling in England during the food rationing while the country was still recovering from the war. Hence, it came as no surprise when my brother was born six years later at St George Hospital, a different site chosen from where I was born. After my birth, we then settled at an apartment in Lillington Street, off Belgrave Road, until I was two years old. In 1955, we moved to a basement apartment of a swish Victorian townhouse at St Georges Square, Pimlico.

My parents and I shared the one bedroom, we used a tiny kitchen, itself barely larger than a telephone kiosk and featuring a disused coal cellar, and a dining room with the old coal fire blocked and an electric heater standing in front of it. Next to the dining room was a windowless corridor resembling a mine shaft, leading to the basement next door. Beyond that was our inclusive bedroom, followed by a disused chamber, possibly another bedroom, its floor littered with discards from other tenants, including a perfectly-working spring-powered gramophone, and some wax records piled next to it. The corners and the window of this room were covered with huge, black cobwebs, and I wondered how these spiders managed to survive without any apparent bugs crawling everywhere. A straight staircase led one from the servant's quarters, where we lived, to the far more ornate first floor. Past the foot of the stairs, the corridor led to some disused cellars.

In the 1950s, many buildings in London were blackened by soot before the great clean-up instigated by the Clean Air Act of 1963. During Autumn and into the Winter, smog polluted the city air, and I wondered whether this thick and dirty fog had an effect on me during gestation, thus, according to my parents, I was born "mentally deficient" as it was known during those days. Yet, I loved thrills, such as climbing onto the bannister and sliding back down it. Yet, Mum didn't hesitate to send me to a corner shop around the block to buy items she had forgotten to buy earlier or had run out of before time. This was an important turning point which eventually led me to be an independent traveller.

Walks completed on my own included a frequent trip to the adventure playground in Churchhill Gardens, an estate of then newly-built high-rise apartment blocks. Actually, the adventure playground was for the immediate residents of the estate, therefore, living outside the estate, I shouldn't have been there, but there was no apparent by-law banning entry by outsiders. At least, my parents knew of my visits to the playground. What they weren't aware of at that time, I was walking further on to Battersea Park, across the river Thames over Chelsea Bridge, itself overlooked by the four huge smokestacks resembling an upturned table, that was Battersea Power Station. When they eventually found out, they were shocked, but not horrified, and I wasn't even told off.

Being "mentally deficient", I was sent to a special school, Wedgewood Primary at Marinefield Road in Fulham (now known as Ormiston Courtyard Academy.) I was happy there. Contrary to being mentally deficient, I was able to read and write quite well - well enough to be asked by the teacher to show my fellow pupils to read. As for maths, I was taught the Basic Four - addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division - and I received more red ticks than crosses on my finished work. In short, for one whose supposed to be "mentally retarded" I was actually quite bright.

At Wedgewood Primary, I was impressed with the four chimneys which overlooked the playground. Unlike those at Battersea Power Station, these four smokestacks were arranged in a straight row. These, I found rather fascinating. There were actually three power stations straddling the River Thames within my area during the fifties and sixties. Battersea Power Station on the south bank, Lots Road Power Station on the north bank in the western end of Chelsea. Like at Battersea, this building also boasted four chimneys arranged at each corner. Lots Road Power Station supplied electricity specifically to the Metropolitan and Circle Lines on the London Underground. Finally, Fulham Power Station, also on the north bank, had its four chimneys looking into our school playground.

Battersea Power Station as I remember it.

Grosvenor Road and the Chelsea Embankment (the same road on either side of Chelsea Bridge) linked two of the three stations - Battersea and Lots Road - and the wide sidewalk with its continuous row of Plane Trees provided a lovely stroll along the embankment. From Chelsea Bridge, both Lots Road and Fulham Power stations could be easily seen, and a view from Wandsworth Bridge, facing east towards Central London, provided views of all three power stations, with Battersea a clear 2.21 miles, 3.56 km away as the crow flies.

Walks along the Embankment had always intrigued me when I was a boy. These walks took place mainly at weekends or during school holidays. I loved the area, especially Battersea Park with its miniature railway, boating lake, fun fair, decorative fountains, skywalk, along with ice cream, doughnut, and candyfloss stalls lining the North Carriage Drive. To the south of the park, further away from the riverbank, a swing park kept me occupied as I gleefully swung back and forth - exactly as I did at a swing park whilst backpacking Australia some 34 years later in 1997!

Walks across London progressed further during this stage of childhood. And that includes finding my way to Natural History Museum in South Kensington, more than two miles from home. Another venue I fell in love with, and getting there on foot from St Georges Square was a breeze. And as such, the foundation for independent travel was laid, both by personal experience, beginning from a short shopping errand, and by getting acquainted with the mysteries beyond our shores by looking at coloured political maps housed in an atlas.

Back at home in the basement of old servant's quarters, Dad owned a Collins Atlas of the World. I loved browsing through it myself, and I soon became familiar with world geography. So intrigued was I, that I wanted to memorise the exact shapes of the continents, and I did this by taking a blank sheet of paper and drawing the outline of all the world's continents - maybe a little distorted, after all, I was still only a boy, but what lies beyond the ocean's horizon had raised my curiosity and fascination. My effort paid off. At our primary, each one in our class was given three sheets, each featuring a portion of the world map. The exercise was to stick the three sheets to make a coherent map. I was the only one in the class who got it right, and my work was put on display in the school hall for all to see.

But if you think that my childhood was all peaches and cream, then think again. Who thought that I was retarded? Although my parents suspected, it was the health professionals who confirmed this and recommended a special school for such backwards children.

The situation was compounded by our neighbours who had children slightly older than me. On one side lived a girl a couple of years my senior - and whom I took a special secret liking - acting more like an adult than I did. Two doors away lived two brothers who were making good progress at school, a mainstream school, I might add! Therefore, the worse thing my parents could ever do was to compare me with them. It had put a strain on our relationship, gradually making me feel worthless and undeserving of any praise. Yet, I did think of Jesus Christ, whom I was told, "was a very good man". During this stage of childhood, I wanted to know this Jesus Christ. In fact, I always wanted him as a friend.

However, with reading, writing and arithmetic reaching the levels of a normal child of similar age, one could have looked again at my IQ level, and that is what happened after moving to Bracknell towards the end of 1963, then aged eleven years old, and placed in a normal school. And obliged to dress in a uniform.  In this small town of English whiteness, how I missed the innocent life in a cosmopolitan city!

Like the time we were in our playground at Wedgewood Primary. During my time there, a set of apparatus arrived at our school and it was installed in the playground. It consisted of a set of steps leading up to a boardwalk. The first length of the boardwalk ended at a small disused beer barrel, open at both ends, then, from the barrel, the boardwalk continued on where it ended with a slide. It was loved by all the children and at every playtime break, an orderly queue of children built up at the start of the steps.

One afternoon, while all the other children were heading to their respective classrooms, one group after another in an orderly fashion, our class were the last to return for lessons. Before this daily discipline began, I climbed into the barrel and hid inside, peering through the bunghole to where the supervisor stood. From within the barrel, I watched as the rest of my class had to line up against the wall. Nobody saw me hiding inside the barrel. I made sure that my arms and legs were fully inside. Thus, as the playground emptied, nobody knew that there was a boy hidden inside the beer barrel, watching everything from the bunghole and fearing whether the supervisor would suddenly march angrily straight to the apparatus! Fortunately, I was afterwards able to slip into class unnoticed.

By 1963, for the whole family sleeping in one bedroom was becoming beyond a joke for Mum and Dad. I had turned eleven, and my brother was four. As my father worked for the Post Office as a postman and Mum as a part-time cleaner, Dad was eventually promoted to a counter clerk. But he also informed his employer that he must live somewhere where we can have separate bedrooms. By December 1963, we moved from Pimlico to a two-bedroom semi-detached house in Bracknell in Berkshire, a provincial town some thirty miles west of Trafalgar Square in London.

At Fox Hill Juniors, somehow, I felt different from the rest of the class. Unlike at Wedgewood, all the kids there were white and English. As such, with an Italian background (even if I was legally British) I was relentlessly bullied. Yet, it took a long time before I started to cry, a move which seemed to have tempered the bullying somewhat. How I missed London! How I missed sitting in a classroom shared with a black boy and with another Italian. How I missed the cosmopolitan feel of the city!

At around 2-3 years old.

The next five years of normal schooling proved to be testing, and there was a feeling of rejection by my parents, having been compared unfavourably with the neighbour's children. The fact that I was placed in the slow learner's class, despite my good progress at the London primary, only added to the aggravation.

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NEXT WEEK: A car breaks down in France, a brush with death, and how a Spanish holiday proved my downfall. 

The Eye In Your Lounge.

This week a political earthquake shook Parliament. No, I'm not talking about the humiliation of both the Tory and Labour parties in Thursday's local Council elections, when both parties had lost a considerable amount of seats: The Conservatives around 1,300 lost seats and Labour 82. That means had this been a General Election, the result would have been a hung Parliament with a tie, with 28% of the national vote for each of them. The remaining 44% of the national vote would have gone to other parties, such as the Liberal Democrats (19%) and minors such as the Green Party.*

No, I'm not writing about any of that.

Rather, it's about that other political earthquake, the one which has 200 Tory ministers jumping up and down with rage. It was the sacking of Defense Minister Gavin Williamson from the Cabinet by our current Prime Minister Theresa May. He was accused of leaking some Governmental secrets to the Daily Telegraph about the G5 intelligence concerning national security, with the possible permission for the Chinese electronics firm Huawei making inroads into the UK, against the advice of the USA and, I believe, also against the advice of the EU.

I can understand why our allies across the Pond can get so strung up about such a company sticking its oar in. What I have heard, it seems to fulfil, or at least partly fulfil, the dire prophecy of George Orwell's novel 1984, which was made into the most melancholic, and if it wasn't confined to the world of fiction, a potentially frightening movie to be shown on the big screen.

A group of us went to see the film at a local cinema. At the time the film was released in October 1984, we were all young unmarried Christian men who regularly attended churches of our choice. Here we were, watching the film, which was an adaption of Orwell's novel, which was published 35 years earlier in June 1949, as the manner of technology and forties-style commodities attest with that time of history, including those monochrome TV sets, each of them displaying a hexagonal screen.

A scene from the movie 1984, of George Orwell's novel.

Except that those TV sets were fixed onto the wall in every room of a typical London residential home, along with installations in every office, factory, hospitals, and the interior of every known building regardless of its purpose. But in the home was the most unsettling. Those TV sets cannot be switched off. Instead, they keep on broadcasting ongoing news bulletins. It was impossible to get away from. An endless stream of information kept on pouring into each room of the house.

Although not featured in the film but nevertheless implied, the need to defecate must have been so embarrassing when in desperate need for privacy, for there on the wall in front, another TV screen is fixed, spilling out one news item after another.

What makes this system so terrifying is that a camera is fixed to every TV set. Therefore every move you make, everything you say and do is transmitted through this camera to Central Intelligence.

This was aptly demonstrated when the star agent had his back to the screen while sifting through some files. Immediately the screen behind him flickered to show someone asking him directly what he was doing with his back turned. The agent then turned and held the empty file wallet to the camera. And all that took place in his own home.

So ominous was the movie that one of our members rose from his seat and walked out of the auditorium, only to sit and wait in the foyer outside for the rest of us to leave after the end of the film. Perhaps I shouldn't have been too surprised at his move. We know that the whole movie was set in London, as from time to time, a view of the derelict Battersea Power Station, a well-known landmark, kept on appearing on the screen between each scene. For him, it was too close to home.

Perhaps George Orwell was more accurate in his predictions than he himself could have imagined. Some years ago I was planning a train trip for the next day, and as I looked for relevant information, all of a sudden this young female in uniform approached me from apparent nowhere to ask what I was doing. There was a queue for the cashier, and either the guy behind the ticket counter, while serving those waiting in the queue, made contact with this staff member, or more likely, I was watched through one of those surveillance cameras. Indeed, I was accused of loitering, an apparent offence I wasn't aware of.

And talking about train travel, one rather iconic feature found attached to the inside of the roof of each modern coach is that characteristic inverted blue dome. Its dominance indicating that "beware, we are watching you" would have made our parents and grandparents feel uncomfortable or unsettled. But at least I'm used to it, for my own safety. I recall those 1960's compartmentalised carriages where I could have been trapped with a questionable or suspicious character who could have taken advantage of me, a vulnerable young teenager, knowing full well that the guard, unable to reach us while the train is moving, would never have known anything of it.

In the film 1984, Battersea Power Station sits derelict.

Or that time I was travelling home to Bracknell from London one late evening in the seventies. All was well until some youths boarded the train at Ascot and took seats on the other side of the same coach. That last part of the journey was tainted by sniggering and mocking as their eyes were fixed on me, a lonely long-haired young man, by a group of white youths with crew-cuts or shaven heads, and posing a level of threat. They remained on board as I alighted, with some relief, at my stop. I'm sure that the presence of the inverted blue dome of glass would have deterred them. But they weren't around during the seventies.

However, as trains go, with each carriage fitted with these surveillance cameras, I do wonder how the guard, or the conductor, cope with the multi-image on his monitor screen. These days the trains on our particular line are ten coaches long, and to watch all ten pictures on a screen, well, I think that would be rather overwhelming. A group of shaven youths harassing an innocent passenger could be easily missed. Then again, maybe not. In all honesty, I have not seen an actual guard's van on our modern trains. Instead, I have often seen him stand at the doors of any carriage, and when the train stops, he activates a mechanism which allows alighting passengers to open the sliding doors by push-button. But a TV or monitor, so far I have not seen one, and I travel by train quite frequently.

Maybe I am stuck in the past when the guard's van was normally seen on all trains. After all, it's what I've always expected to see. A thought has crossed my mind while writing this blog. Could it be that those surveillance cameras are fake? A psychological con trick to deter any potential mischief while on board? It's nothing new. For years, fake cameras have been erected along highways to deter speeding vehicle drivers. Many are still there to this day along with the functional ones. It's impossible for the passing driver to tell the fake from the functional. Could our trains have adopted the same principle?

The case with Gavin Williamson is something altogether different. I take it that he is against the idea of the Chinese company Huawei taking hold on British surveillance or security. I have heard rumours. Rumours of a brave new world akin to George Orwell's novel. However strenuously he denies any involvement of the leak, I am on his side, as with many Tory MPs. 

I once wrote to a friend on Facebook that after Brexit, Britain could be a sitting duck for a vassal state to the Chinese. A threat of this was already underway a couple of years ago in 2016 when a project for a nuclear power station sponsored by the Chinese Government was suddenly halted by our Government just as our Prime Minister Theresa May was about to sign the agreement. It is said that the electronics firm Huawei is a private company. This at first, I found hard to swallow considering that China is a Communist country, after its founder, Chairman Mao Zedong's reign during the latter half of the Twentieth Century, who had millions of his own people slaughtered in order to abolish all private enterprise under his administration. Apparently, things have changed since the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, allowing some private enterprise, but remaining closely under Government scrutiny.

Maybe, like the case with the guard's van, I'm behind the times. I'm aware of Soviet Communism giving up the ghost after the Glasnost and Perestroika movements occurring around 1990, and it does look as though China has taken the same route, allowing a limited form of capitalism to thrive. Hence the existence of such a private firm Huawei, which I believe may turn our Sovereign, post-Brexit nation into a vassal state for China, an opinion which I believe is shared with Gavin Williamson and others.   

The thought of a camera linking our lounge to a central Government intelligence via a TV set looks to me to be very ominous! But that what our links to China via Huawei could bring about. It is a blood-curdling thought.

Gavin Williamson - Do we share the same anxieties?

And yet I, as a Christian believer, am under surveillance all the time. But not just with what I say and do. But also with my thoughts, motives and emotions too. Absolutely nothing is kept private or secret from this Central Intelligence, which is a heavenly one. This is because God knows everything about me. And rather than posing a threat, this is a very good thing - to be under God's constant surveillance. And it's not because he wants to see how I will behave or to see whether I would stay faithful or walk away and fall into apostasy. Rather, it's to love me, to care for me, to bless me, and also to discipline me when necessary, not for him to seek revenge or seek retribution - Jesus Christ took all that upon himself on the Cross - but for me to partake in his holiness and to enjoy the richest of unity with him as the Holy Spirit dwells within.

Psalm 139 is all about this heavenly surveillance. It is a Psalm really worth reading through. To summerise:

He knows when I rise and when I go to bed.

He is able to discern all my thoughts.

He knows what I'm going to say before even saying it.

He hems me in in a way it's impossible to escape - no matter how far from home I travel.

I cannot be hidden from Him, no matter how thick the darkness.

I was intricately made by Him even while still in the womb.

He knows my frame thoroughly.

Every day of my life was ordained by Him before I was even born.

Knowing all these things brings comfort, joy and reassurance, not fear, embarrassment or guilt.

Indeed, human surveillance is a slight to my privacy, but God's loving surveillance is a wonder to all believers.

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*Daily Mail, Saturday, May 4, 2019.