Well, hello, and welcome to a slightly different edition of My Egotistical Drivel. You've missed (probably) a bit of excitement here - an acquaintance from my distant past found my last entry in particular a source of some misunderstanding, and my energies have been briefly diverted to pursuing his field of enquiry, which was fun! Fun mostly because he was actually replying to me, therefore simulating the idea of 'society' a bit better than this blog thing. Basically, he was nonplussed by my negativity - not having had anything to do with me since I was young, and presumably less realistic (in fact, that would be when I still thought people who went out with each other were doing so as a precursor to marriage, and that I would one day be Prime Minister), he didn't realise just how fair and unbiased my view of humanity is, and interpreted it as xenophobia. (Since then I've thought of a better word - anthrophobia. Far more accurate, and not politically incorrect at all, if the extant word 'cynical' doesn't already fit the bill.) If anyone is interested please let me know, as I did transfer the discussion to more neutral, less public ground. I like to keep my blog clean.
I haven't done anything anyway, I'm afraid. Jess and I have sat in this place called Dharamkot for weeks now... Eating falafel (soon I'll put a lovely photo of Jess enjoying her daily falafel plate on facebook. Something to look forward to there!), playing chess, trying to avoid the militant hippies that the place is teeming with (we did actually hear an American lady telling her humous-quaffing companions that she had 'been so close to really achieving enlightenment at Hum Meditation that morning'), occasionally going for a clamber. Again, clambering is more fully lauded on facebook. I know, it's stupid, but although it is EVIL it has got photo uploading worked out pretty well.
The upshot of our inertia is that I've had little to write about, and have felt, moreover, a bit too dull in the head. The pressure of the increasingly 'head-in-a-bag' climate, combined with the medicine we've been taking to cure us of Having Motivation, makes sitting in really slow internet cafes much less attractive. But now we're waiting for a ten-hour bus to Manali, a journey which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful in the world. (The bus, however, leaves at 9pm and arrives at 7am, therefore carefully eliminating daylight from its modus operandi. There was no other option. I'm sure there will be still be some views available when we get there.) I've been thinking about what people really need to know, what I'D want to know in your position, and I've come up with the following glittering ideas of rare perception;
what are jess and jake WEARING every day?
We posted our jeans back after five days in Rajasthan, when it was impossible to imagine how anyone could possibly wear denim on this planet. Then we got here and it got dark and we got cold and all the cool young Tibetan kids are wearing jeans and we missed our jeans. But we're managing without. I have had to buy a cheap, sweaty, rubberised waterproof smock which comes down to my knees but only down to my elbows (I look like a large duck with its legs coming out the sides), but apart from that and a pair of rather attractive stripey trousers, which the locals would certainly class as 'pajamas' but which still look like M&S chinos compared to what the other travellers are wearing - apart from these limited excursions into the world of Himalayan handicrafts, all the experimentation has been Jess's. (She has this habit of doing really remarkably selfless things - going on missions to the ATM, spoiling me rotten for a while, suggesting that I have another beer, and then waiting for me to compensate by 'letting her' buy herself something. (That's how she does it, honestly - I never stop her doing anything, but Jess seems to need to personalise her common sense and notion of responsibility.) So Jess has stopped wearing the Real Indian clothes she bought - it's less conservative up here than on the plains - and now wears soft baggy trousers, or her gorgeous Kashmir cotton skirt, and one or several of the ubiquitous long-sleeved tops she's managed to locate in every single country she's ever been to. I have started to wear more utilitarian clothes (grey active-type trousers, a rather highly-specified NorthFace fleece I've had to buy as a replacement), because we've had to come back to town, among the traffic and the filth, in order to go to hospital with my little jar of unhygienic offering, my sacrifice to the Tibetan Tummy Laboratory.
do Jake and Jess ever go anywhere at the moment?
Ooh, yeah, we did something then. We went all the way up to Triun, which is nearly at the snow line, and we stayed in proper shack-like rusticity for a night. Still slept surrounded by young drunk Punjabis throwing rum around and shouting and playing several different musics on several different tinny-bastard phones at the same time, but we're getting used to our extraordinary luck - apart from the people in the ONLY OTHER HUT ON THE WHOLE GODDAMN MOUNTAIN, it was truly remote, and it was truly lovely. And then I woke up the next day doubled up in agony, knew pretty fast that I was horribly ill, and gradually came to terms with the fact that I had no option but to stagger, cramping and vomiting, all the way down the mountain. So that was a bit rubbish for both of us, especially since when we were up there the clouds only parted for a minute or two. But I did it though. Amazing what you do when you have to.
So we also went to the hospital. And it was Tibetan and clean and nice, with views of green valleys, and the doctor was better in all terms than any doctor I've had in the UK for as long as I can remember. This leads me nicely to my next list.
what drugs are Jess and Jake taking at the moment?
Well, this has just got a lot more exciting. Back in Udaipur I mentioned to a guy from whom Jess was buying loo-roll that I was having problems sleeping, preparatory to inquiring whether ear-plugs exist in India. He gave me something called 'diazepam' which we established in imperfect English was a bit like Horlicks. I found it very helpful, in that I could then sleep well and feel fine the next day, and had no need for the Valium which all the other travellers are getting excited about (yeah, I know, it's strange, I always thought it had quite the opposite effect!) No other pharmacy would give me any - and they wouldnt' give me any Valium either. I have been slightly embarrassed to find out, courtesy of (who else?) Minno, that diazepam IS valium, and that probably the reason nobody would give me any of this stuff under the counter was because when I was talking to these pharmacists I didn't sound like I had any idea what I was talking about.
My Tibetan friend at the hospital gave me some though. He also gave me thirty huge yellow antibiotic pills to take, in recognition of my heroic faecal sacrifice and my telling him that I have been farting excessively and symphonically ("like an orchestra", I explained to him helpfully) for about three weeks. It cost, in total, eighty p. Now I have lots of pills. Jess and I also take something called Acidopholus. It's like yoghurt in tablet form. I think. Each one can make five million good bacteria cities in your tummy. I think. It's to stop us getting the bugs we've got. (Jess has them too; they'll wait til she's a bit run-down then POUNCE! Pounce on her colon.)
I only used one Nicotine patch when we got here, because I quickly discovered that they are as addictive than breathing and twice as easy. Jess only used her weird little inhaler thing once, I think basically because no matter how hard she sucked it didn't provide her with any smoke whatsoever. Jess has some of her own pills to take (but that's her story), plus we sometimes have to eat painkillers to reward our brains for tolerating the isobars, plus of course we're cooking up ketamine and heroin from the dodgy pharmacies and injecting each other in the roof of the mouth every morning after breakfast. (Jess says I shouldn't mention that, but I think it'll be okay. I think everyone has probably learned by now that they shouldn't trust a word I say and that I consider nonsense a lot more interesting than bare information.)
Now I really have to go, though. Jess is capable of spending an utterly darling amount of time on the laborious inscription of postcards with tiny, beautiful script, but I think I might be stretching my allowance rather - she's got the bags so she ain't going anywhere, and it's probably my turn to go and bag-sit now.
Mentally wish us luck for the journey tonight (at ten hours, it's not the longest, but it's the first one in the dark, along a road that bus drivers plunge off as a regional pastime), just as we mentally curse all those of you in the UK for getting the first proper spell of hot weather since 2006, while we, on 'holiday', get thoroughly drenched on a daily basis.
Next time, I intend to list 'things I like about India' and 'things I don't like about India'. It's going to be AWESOME!
Yearning for yall tragically,
jx
