To Europe and Beyond #13: Bio – Europe

By: Ian Elliott

By the time you read this letter (sniff, sniff, oh woe is me), I will be mad.

Not the kind of mad that you assume with the loonies of the present age but the kind of ‘mad’ mad that you only see in European films from the late 1930’s. The kind of madness that assails a character in a H.P. Lovecraft novel, shortly after the eloquent opening sequences and shortly before the chief protagonist encounters ’such Cyclopean horrors as to turn the frozen plasma within my trembling veins into the very brew of Satan himself’.

In short, I am about to delve deeply into a place that I have not been for a great deal of time.

I am about to plunge, headlong and screaming like a classical banshee, into the various notepads, folders, files, piles of papers and mounds of photographs that I brought back with me from my insanity inducing trip to Europe. Before I begin, however, I feel it only fair to trace a little of my past history.

From humble beginnings upon the banks of the River Wear in County Durham in the North East of England, my world began. I was the second child of middle class parents. My Father was a highly respected and highly decorated member of the local Police force and my Mother ran her own hairdressing salon where she honed the barbarous techniques which would become the bane of my existence in my later years.

I was bred with a set of cast-iron manners and morals and was fortunate enough to inherit my father’s dry wit and intelligence whilst simultaneously being gifted with my mother’s ability with words, spelling and grammar whilst also, unfortunately, being genetically fortified with my mother’s less than even temperament, a facet of our shared personalities somewhat akin to Krakatoa in a horridly bad and vengeful mood.

My childhood passed in a haze of Winnie the Pooh afternoons in the countryside surrounding the home of my beloved grandmother. Endless days of rural wanderings and peaceful, contemplative meanderings accompanied by a copy of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, the works of Lord Tennyson and C.S. Lewis and a notepad were the staple diet of my formative years.

The clouds, the swaying grass, the burgeoning meadows, the fuzzy bumblebees and the gentle song of my friends, the birds, were the defining factors of my spiritual and intellectual personality, combining, within the virgin territory of my soul, to create a man whose essence was the purest poetry itself. I ran in the dew soaked fields as a child, danced with my feet in cool silver streams as a boy, sat with my back resting against the broad chest of an ancient oak tree, writing sweet poetry as a youth and then as a young man, well, as a young man I took the next logical step.

I promptly fell off the wagon of convention, found drugs and meaningless sex and spent the next few years in a hell of sorts. A brooding unreality of blood-boiled skies, hideously insinuating shadows and screaming voices, lost in a netherworld of LSD, Amphetamines, enough Cannabis to cause a product drought in Morocco, Cocaine, talking couches, shoes that would often defy conventional law and grow wings and eventually, a mind that had regressed to it’s base instinct, which was merely to survive.

I lost the ability to socialise and communicate and became disassociated from each and every single facet of society on all levels. I was a dead man living in a dead world full of living people.

Yet, whatever horror the hallucinogens and the plants and pills had visited upon me had been acquired by myself and myself alone. I was at once the sole victim and the sole culprit in this ’song’ of fallen youth, broken promise and shattered opportunity. My mind resembled a graveyard, an eerie, haunted salutation to stupidity and self directed hatred.

I loathed what I had become yet loved, so very deeply, the man that I knew that I was, so, after one final hurrah (involving enough LSD to freak out the entire population of Norway) I decided that I would clean up my act and return my frail frame to former glories.

This was to prove easier said than done.

After a miserable period of ‘cold-turkey’ I found myself, late one evening, in a fit of inescapable delusion, banging my head against my parents window, my body whipped by the tempests within, my poorly mind a testament to sadness and woe.

The door opened and I saw the look on my parents’ face as this pale shadow of the son that they had once known stumbled inside, mumbling incoherent ramblings, his eyes, red with tears, darting nervously hither and thither, his skin pale, his body thin to the point of emaciation.

One look towards them and I knew that things must, that things would, change. They wrapped their arms around me and I felt the sunshine again. I was a little boy lost and suddenly found. Their love was a guiding light which led me back towards the only safety and joy that I had ever known, the joy of living.

My father’s caring voice was the grass under my feet. The gentle touch of my mother’s fingers sweeping limp hair from a fevered brow was as the autumn wind’s gentle caress. The safety that they provided, the encouragement and the love that they so unselfishly and so willingly gave again was the grass and the meadow and the dew that refreshed and repaired this broken man.

Each gentle word was a thought returned. Each moment of love was a flash of, once more understood, inspiration. Each embrace that they gave through those long, hard months was a treasure that the world could never afford and gradually, the colour began to return to the world.

Birdsong replaced whisper, the patter of rain forced away the thunderclap, the glint of the sun replaced the little splits of lightning that cut at my heart.

After almost a year, the most difficult year of my entire life, I became the man that we all once knew.

I was reborn into the greatest spiritual and physical existence. I found my god inside and he was a god of my own. A god of inner peace and harmony, tinged with resolution and the slight pang of regret for the lost years.

I was me again, weaker for the knowledge yet stronger for the experience. And then, my friends, and then I found travel and my world became complete. From epiphany came direction. From the maelstrom came a guiding light, hovering and flitting over the entire globe like a firefly in the dead of night.

The world, and I shall use the time worn phrase for it fits the moment perfectly, was indeed my oyster.

A treasure that I had dived deep and painfully to find. At first murky and dull under the pressure of the water but gleaming like the first rays of gentle dawn as it’s beauty fused with the morning sun.

Every which way was a way of promise. Each name of place, of town, of city, of country, of mountain pass, desert plain or lush tropic, sea or mithril stream was a spell to be spoken into a lover’s ear.

I was a man again, no, not again, I was a man for the first time. Born into a land of promise. Awakening from a nightmare to find a perpetual Christmas morning in every new day. I was a virgin again in all senses. Nothing was old and tired. Every single molecular strain of life was still in its wrapper awaiting to be opened by my hands alone. So, I wasted not one moment of my second life.

From the moment that once again I opened my eyes, my life has never known greater love. I bid adieu to the horror and the pain and stepped onto the road of travel and I have not stopped walking since.

Well, apart from the occasional stop for coffee and a newspaper in a cafe where each face is a portrait painted by a master.

But that, my friends, is by the by and if I may, I would like to tell you all a story. A gentle tale of the moment in which I decided (admittedly drunk) to once more step out of life and set foot upon that hallowed road to my very own Bethlehem. I shall call it “To Europe and Beyond: An extraordinary tale of one man’s determination to make up for lost time”.

Please, my friends, take a seat, sit back, sip whiskey from a crystal glass and
join me on my travels.

And remember, the world really is your oyster, they just come in different
shapes, that’s all.

Inquiries or feedback, contact: ianjameselliott@hotmail.com