Chapter zero: Preparing for the journey

<Back to Prologue

They say that perfect preparation prevents piss poor performance. Clearly Dan and I had not yet integrated this maxim into the way we did things. We had no clue what lay ahead of us, and it showed in our naïve enthusiasm.

We arrived, feeling upbeat, at the Flora, a massive building with warehouse space and offices which had been squatted in the town of Rijnsburg, but which had only three occupants. I had only ever been there before when they were having a rave, so the emptiness of the place felt alien and eerie to me. Apparently, this feeling is known as kenopsia.

Armed with our last few euros, Dan and I went around the corner to the supermarket. I grabbed a bag of dried fruit and nuts, known in the Netherlands as studentenhaver, and several 30 cent chocolate bars, convincing myself that at over 500 calories per bar, this represented a good cost to energy ratio. Dan grabbed a jar of baked beans (yes, they come in jars in Holland), two large bottles of water, and a couple of packs of circular toast, called beschuit.

“What shall we spread on them?” I asked.

“This?” Dan replied cheekily, holding up smeerleverworst (spreadable liver paté) “I know how you like a big sausage…”

We returned to the Flora with our shopping and I immediately began the task of handwashing as many of my clothes as I could face doing in one session. I quickly tired of rinsing and re-rinsing fetid socks until the water was no longer grey, and hung everything up haphazardly in the main warehouse. I curled up on some cushions in the corner of the bedroom and slowly dropped off to sleep.

I awoke with a start, feeling like death, my hands painfully blistered from wringing out wet socks the night before. The room was a hive of activity, and I looked up to see that Malcolm had arrived and was chatting to the guys. Dan was repacking his rucksack and an extremely large and fragrant spliff was on the go. I took a few puffs and wandered out to see if my clothes had dried. They hadn’t. I packed everything into a binliner, said hurried goodbyes to the guys in the squat, and stumbled out to the car with Dan and Malcolm, who offered to get supplies from the supermarket on the way so we could eat together one last time.

Sometimes a piece of music takes you by surprise by echoing exactly how you feel in a given moment. As a musician I am hypersensitive to patterns and progressions in a composition. I seem to analyse rhythms and chord changes involuntarily, which I feel sometimes robs me of full immersion in the soundscape. But even so I can be taken aback by moments of startling beauty in music. As I sat alone in the car waiting for the guys to return, a gorgeous folky song started playing on the radio. Something about lion men and bravery and a plethora of other plagiarised literary references. As the guys got back in the car, the song passed from one movement to the next and into glorious chorus. The three of us just sat there, utterly transfixed.

“Wow,” I whispered as the song finished, “who was that?”

“That was Mumford and Sons,” Dan replied, beaming.

We returned to the squat and Malcolm set about cooking a fry-up for us all while I put my clothes outside in the last of the afternoon sun. Being on the verge of leaving, and having just been exposed to songs containing so many literary and biblical references, I thought of the last supper. We ate slowly, talked quietly, smiled reassuringly, eye contact lasting just a fraction longer than was usual. In that moment the strength of the bonds between the three of us were brought into sharp focus.

The evening sun had almost dried the clothes I had hung over the wooden fence outside at the back of the house. They were still ever so slightly damp, but it would have to do. I repacked my rucksack, more carefully this time and noted how properly folded clothes take up less space in a bag than clothes just stuffed in any old way - advice given by every mother, but only truly integrated by direct experience. I wrapped my sleeping bag in a black rubbish bag and tied it to the front of my rucksack with washing line.

As usual, I was ready last. The three of us walked to the car in silence, a silence seemingly observed too by our environment. The air was still. No rustling leaves, no bird chatter, nothing. The autumn sun made everything appear to glow orange and cuddled me with its gentle warmth.

Malcolm dropped us at the slip road to the motorway going south. We embraced and he drove off. The sun was beginning to set already, and the golden light glinted through Dan’s black curls. And though this made him appear majestic, his face was more sombre than before, as if the gravity of what we were about to do had finally hit home. Under my breath I muttered: “Hey little lion man, you’re not as brave as you were at the start…”