The Place

As you probably gathered, On The Road has fallen distinctly quiet for some time now. I haven't been in a particularly good place to write; personally, nor other-ly, let's say. Even a sentence which I don't want to bin immediately simply cannot be conjured like a rabbit. But hope has returned favour (for me at least and less so for you) as I would appear to have re-found The Place.

The Place (noun): a place where I don't write, but the words come to me.

In the last couple of years I've had the fortune that The Place was easy to find. In Japan, it was the train between my town, Shiroishi, and Sendai. Every other day I took the train to the city for some kind of social call and, when I wasn't getting a head start with a train beer or two or nestling into the seat drunken dozing, I was writing. The first time I took the train from Shiroishi into Sendai I was with a girl; also recently moved to Shiroishi, also Asian, also called Jenny. The road into Shiroishi had been undeniably less stimulating, we burned tarmac in my supervisor's car, passing small concrete boxes and road signs which my hangover ignored. (cheers guys, you know who you are). That week as I settled into the country life, I became increasingly aware of how small Shiro is. Coming straight from a massive city (the Glasgow metropolitan area has a population of 2 million), I was rather bored. Jen and I decided that what we needed was a bit of human interaction. The week we arrived was also the week during which one of the biggest festivals of the Tohoku region was taking place. Straight after work we jumped on the first train to the Tanabata festival. Jumped is perhaps the wrong verb to use here as the linguistic ordeal of buying a train ticket was a definite hindrance. But soon enough we were sitting down on a train. If you have ever watched Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (if not, I don't like you any more), you probably remember the seating plan on the train. The seats are not arranged like an ordinary train in the UK, with short rows of two or three seats on either side of the carriage, separated by a gangway. Instead, the seats in some trains in Japan are set vertically along the carriage. Not much seating space, but clearly more efficient for a game of sardines. As the train departed we saw pieces of the village we would soon call home. Tiny cardboard houses and rusty ramen signs suddenly gave way to a river riding east, rice paddies populated by hungry cranes, and the hills which bordered them, breathing damp mist.

We passed in unbroken silence.

Of course, as I became better aquainted to the scenery and the respectability of train beer, I became less bewildered on the train. Yet the serenity remained, and became the backdrop for at least 70% of the poetry which I wrote in Japan.

But not all train journeys are quite as productive for writing. The journey from Sendai to Nagano for example. Clocking over 11 hours on local trains, I didn't even write a limerick. Neither did I write on the tracks from Tsuruoka to Shiga (in 2 days I racked up 20 hours of train time). I did, however, write a response to an article about being a guilty 'flyjin' foreigner in post-tsunami-quake-nuclear disaster Japan which was published in the Daily Yomuri. On my phone.

The Transiberian too, despite the ridiculous journey time. I managed only to craft the bare bones of the idea for a play which I have yet to write. The difficulty being, it just wasn't The Place.

Thinking back to Paris, I had so much artistic competition. It was complete immersion; from the ghosts of writers who had starved on Rue Montorgueil, to my contemporaries who arrived on a dream of little more than a 11m2 studio shared with a stray cat and too many coffee grounds. The last flat I found myself squatting in (thanks again Love, I miss you so much), I spent most of my time in some kind of stupor with film makers, travellers, painters, philosophers, bartenders, and chefs. And a lecturer of economics. That's perhaps why the writing was effortless. The life I had there lent itself well to writing, I was permanently stimulated by my bizarre life as a penniless, homeless writer.

The struggling artist. Some clichés are just true.