A great deal of discomfort, some pain, a feeling of humiliation, loss of self-esteem, frustration, anger, sadness. Then, several times a day, miraculous recovery. That’s my life with Parkinson’s disease. They say that depression is a very common symptom but I don’t experience that. I’m down and I’m up. Sometimes it seems as grim as can be. Sometimes, quite often as it happens, I’m in a mental state of mild euphoria; I call it happy moron syndrome. And I should also mention sleeplessness; I’m writing this at four o’clock in the morning.
I have found that denial and not looking into the future are important ways of coping with the illness to some extent but they have their limitations. And so, a few years ago, I read up about the possible later stages of the disease. It can be very bad indeed with very severe disablement, incontinence and depression among the symptoms. I have heard of hospitalised Parkinson’s patients who are unable to swallow being fed by means of a tube. I decided that a long term plan might include suicide and I came to think of myself as having a terminal illness. I must say that the thought of suicide generally cheers me up considerably. There is a way out. And being alive suddenly seems a very wonderful thing. The world looks especially beautiful. I am struck by the need to live for now; to try to live more intensely. To travel.
I have been lucky enough to have a great travelling companion in the shape of Flic and my illness has brought us closer together. She recently said that Parkinson’s has changed me and that when I feel rough I can be disagreeable. Disafuckingreeable, I snarled, in what way? Which made us laugh. Yes, humour is another strategy for coping, and one that we use on a daily basis.
Now I had better mention two things that I have become aware of this year. I’ve noticed that the illness is progressing more slowly than I anticipated and I also have heard a lot about new treatments and possible cures. So, as I write this, suicide is not on the agenda; you’ll be pleased to hear that.
At the beginning of this book I said that travelling changes a person. It does. We now have lasting connections to the places we have visited and the people that live there. We follow the news from the Indian subcontinent. I have tried to learn more about the politics of Latin American countries. And, of course, there is the Middle East, especially the Israel/Palestine situation. I find my opinion of the issues there shifting with every new piece of information. I have to say that I found Israel to be, in many ways, a fine country and Israelis, in many ways, good people. But that fine country and those good people are responsible for a great deal of suffering and injustice experienced by their neighbours, the Palestinians. Why is that? I’m afraid you’ll have to find out for yourself; I am not the person and this is not the time to go into all the complexities of those issues.
Our connection with the Middle East did lead us to read a wonderful book by an Israeli writer called Amos Oz – A Tale of Love and Darkness. It is a very personal memoir of his childhood in Jerusalem in the 1940s and beyond. Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian who grew up a few streets away has also written a fine book about his life – Once Upon a Country. The books tell of very different experiences of the same place. The two men have both known unhappiness and injustice and have the right to be bitter and angry. They have reason be enemies. They are, in fact, great friends, visiting each other’s houses and both playing a part in the peace movement. They have both made the effort to learn from each other and understand the other one’s viewpoint. I admire these guys. I find myself wanting to emulate their open-mindedness, their willingness to learn from each other. And that is something that travel has done for me. It has brushed away some preconceptions, misconceptions and prejudices. And it has allowed me to see into other peoples’ worlds. To be lastingly connected to them.
Our last big trip abroad consisted of four weeks in Morocco in February and March 2013. It seems like a long time ago now and we are sure, really this time we’re sure, that we won’t go travelling again. There are times of day and night when I’m very seriously disabled by this illness (I’m not going to give you all the details) and to be so ill far away from home is out of the question. Now it feels like we made a very good decision several times over in the last few years: to make a very special journey, a trip of a lifetime. And to be more intensely alive for a while.
I don’t want to say much about Morocco. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine country and we had a good time there. I would recommend it. It’s just that we had made five big trips to extraordinary parts of the world before we went there and we had begun to lose our capacity for wonder and our excitement at being somewhere new. So I only want to give some snapshots of some of the places we visited, a little taste of what made that country different and special.
First there was Marrakesh. It’s a short flight from the UK but you get off the plane, take a bus ride into town and arrive at the square called Djemaa El-Fna, and are deep in the heart of an exotic culture, very different from our own. There are story tellers and acrobats, and live music and dancers and snake charmers. Some of it is put on for the tourists but much of it is for locals. We also loved the parks and gardens in Marrakech; sunshine and the smell of orange blossom are not things you find much of at home in February. And we came across a sort of hiring fair, I think it might have been called years ago in Britain; guys sitting in a row by their mopeds or bikes advertising their trade by displaying, for instance, some copper piping or electrical wires or carpentry tools, and waiting for someone to offer them work. Flic asked if she could take a photograph of them and they were fine about it.
We went to Essaouira, an important fishing port on the Atlantic coast; touristy but with a huge fleet of boats big and small, and fish being bartered for on the quayside and a sky full of seagulls. We stayed in ordinary towns like Tiznit and watched the street life: the handcart men, the beggars, the brightly dressed women and the guys with pointy hoods like something out of Lord of the Rings.
We stayed in Tafraout and did some cycling and walking among the curious rock formations of the Anti-Atlas. We came across a wild boar and tried to follow it which gave me the opportunity of writing the blog post title: Sometimes seeing more boar spoor – sometimes not so sure.
One of my favourite places was Agdz where we stayed in a guesthouse on the edge of a palmerie, a sort of oasis with date palms, pomegranates, almonds, barley, and beans growing in the valley bottom surrounded by arid stark hills. The land was divided up by mud walls and people came and went on little donkey carts. It was especially beautiful at dawn and dusk.
We had our usual bad moments with my health. Times when I would feel scared of being so helplessly disabled so far from home. Flic would patiently wait for me to feel better and braver and we would go on. We had gone through this often enough in South America and the Middle East for her to be an expert at not panicking and at being patient with me.
I never wrote of these moments in my blogs. Denial, as they say, is not a river in Egypt. It’s a useful strategy for dealing with a long term serious illness. And so my blog posts would be all sunshine and light, like this one:
Yesterday we tried to get a bus up into the mountains but the road was blocked by snow. That surprised us as it was hot in the day and warm at night in Taroudant where we were staying. So this morning we set off for Ouarzazate. But the bus stopped in this little town (can’t remember what it’s called) and we got off because it looked nice. The light is very clear here and the barren hills stand out against a blue sky. There are kasbahs, mudwalled castles, in various states of decay dotted about the landscape. The valley floor is very green with palm trees, alfalfa, barley etc. We walked through the farmland and along a river bank – yes, that’s right, a river with water in it. People wave to us and call out bonjour. Storks, six of them, drift about above the town in the wind.
Travelling is a different state of being. You see new things every day: strange birds, flowers, trees; a thousand ways of meeting and greeting with combinations of handshakes, hands to heart, hugs, air kisses, kisses on top of the head and so on; a profusion of head coverings with hoods and turbans and baseball caps and more worn in combinations (yes, two hats per head sometimes – why not); unusual architecture, different ways of behaving...
To while away the time on long bus journeys in Morocco we made an A to Z of place names, each one the name of a town we had been to and each one in a different country. It wasn’t easy and we got stuck on the letter Z. Then it looked like we might go to an end-of-the-road, edge-of-the-desert town called Zagora. Some of the places we visited along the way were moderately wonderful and we didn’t hurry. We dawdled in the palmeries of Agdz for far too long, ran out of time, and headed for home. There was a plane we had to catch and there were other places we wanted to visit on the way. We wanted to walk in the High Atlas Mountains and we had to go to back to Marrakesh. We never made it to Zagora.
It was in Marrakesh nearly a month earlier that I had what felt like a significant moment on a rooftop. It was before sunrise but I was awake early, as usual, and up on the roof watching the day begin. I could see palm trees and minarets and countless other rooftops with their water tanks and TV aerials. In the south the snow-capped Atlas Mountains were catching the morning light.
Then the call to prayer sounded out some distance away across the city and came in a wave towards me, getting louder as it got close and more voices joined in. It can be a beautiful sound in the Middle East or other places but somehow they do it differently in Morocco; it’s more like the braying of a thousand donkeys than anything else. I think the job of muezzin, the man in the minaret, is passed down from father to son and not awarded on talent. That’s my guess because there’s some rough and tuneless calling to prayer going on there. Or at least that’s how it sounded to me.
Eventually the local muezzin in the local mosque, quite close by, started his call. He really did have a rough voice and, to my ears, it was not a good sound. But he was loud and he was enthusiastic, you had to say that. The call to prayer is amplified over loudspeakers these days but it’s live, not pre-recorded. And so it was that I heard one man’s heartfelt song above the general cacophony and got a sense of what it meant to him. His voice rose and his passion grew and I was unexpectedly moved. It was a lump-in-throat, teary-eyed moment. Belief in a bigger, more profound purpose and meaning to our existence, and a joy in that purpose and meaning, echoed across the city. And one man’s voice sung out above the rest.
Most of all I was moved by a sense of something special about humanity, about the strength of the human spirit maybe. But I also couldn’t help but think, just for a moment, that there might be inside each of us something much bigger than us. This felt like a revelation, an almost spiritual experience. I had a strong sense of something much larger of which we are all a part. That’s as far as I’m willing to go. I have been an atheist all my life but in recent years I have sometimes wanted to be an agnostic, someone who admits to the possibility of a deeper meaning. And for a moment, between first light and sunrise, on a rooftop in Marrakesh, I moved a step closer to the possibility of belief. It felt good at the time.
In Morocco signs are often written in our script as well as in Arabic. I noticed that shops are often named Al Quds, after the Holy City. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the centre of all the misery in the world, as we heard it described when we were there. I remember our experience in that city now and I think of it as the antidote to belief. And I remember Lumbini, in Nepal, and the temples that made up what I thought of as the Birthplace of the Buddha Theme Park. I think of the improb-able multilimbed Hindu gods in India and the libations to Pachamama in Bolivia. It all looks, from the outside, like superstition. So much for deeper meanings. Never mind.
I think the meaning of life is in the living of it, nothing more. It feels pretty good to me. Perhaps this is a sort of existentialism but not of the angst-ridden miserable variety, more of a happy existentialism. Zagora may or may not be a worthwhile destination but it’s the journey that matters. Like everybody else I’ve experienced sadness and pain. But I’ve been lucky; much of the time my journey has been a happy experience. Not deeply meaningful but profoundly worthwhile.