Another thing: The Summer I Bought a Bongo

Concerning holidays.

Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, though, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.

When I was eleven years old or so, we went on a family holiday to Fuerteventura, a sandy island that I’ve just now realised is off the coast of Africa. And look, I'm not complaining. It was a big holiday and we were very lucky to be taken on holiday at all. All I’m saying is that, back in 2001, I don’t know if Fuerteventura was my vibe. 

I was a pale and shy pre-teen. I couldn’t swim. I couldn’t drink. I didn’t like being in the sun at all, and I was an extremely fussy eater. It’s for these reasons that I spent much of our week cloistered away in my room in the resort, reading Lord of the Rings and listening to Toxicity by System of a Down on a cassette walkman, rewinding it with a pencil every time I finished so I could jump back in. I got so familiar with the album that week that I used to be able to pencil my way to different songs almost exactly, meaning I could carefully soundtrack different parts of the book. The bit where Frodo and Sam get to the top of Mount Doom and have to fight Gollum will always, always be soundtracked with the song Aerials in my mind. 

But, much like a kind of Y2K Gollum, I couldn’t stay in my cave forever and was eventually drawn out to explore the sights and sounds of Fuerteventura. We walked up a hill, went on a boat, played mini-golf. Classic stuff. The experience most seared into my mind, though, was a visit to one of those big markets where you can get your name carved onto a grain of rice or buy a some problematic headgear. I had some money burning a hole in my pocket so I wandered the stalls, overwhelmed with choice and terrified of the concept of haggling. What am I into, I wondered. What would the kids back home be impressed by? Given limitless choice, what would I choose to express myself?

Well, after a decent period of unsupervised browsing, I emerged with 1) a small camel-skinned bongo, and 2) a henna tattoo. The tattoo was a kind of pointy curvy symbol with a pleasing rotational symmetry. It was only pointed out to me later that evening that, at a casual glance, the tattoo looked a bit too much like a swastika so I had to cover it up for the rest of the holiday and scrub it off at the earliest opportunity.

It was a startling illustration of how little I knew myself. Taken slightly out of my comfort zone, I had had a total identity crisis within minutes. Perhaps that’s just life as an eleven year old. Nobody knows themselves at that age. But then, holiday’s are oddly exposing things in themselves. Putting yourself in a foreign environment, and trying to replicate preconceived ideas about what you do on holiday, means confronting who you really are. What do you actually like doing with your time? Am I really a bongo guy?*

So much of holidaying is performance. You’re going through the motions that someone else has established for you in an attempt to be something different. We try to escape from aspects of our lives and ourselves. We try to be more relaxed and carefree, only to find that, actually, our personalities have followed us out there. And that’s part of the thrill of it - leaving the trappings of your life means you’re better able to see your true self.

I spent my twenties going on the kinds of holidays I thought I should. People love sitting on the beach, I’m always told, so maybe I would too? It’s only in recent years, as I’ve explored before, that I’ve discovered the things I actually like to do or, more precisely, have started to embrace who I actually am.

I’m thinking about holidays this week because we’ve just had to cancel a couple on account of my partner's health. There’s no easy time to be chronically ill, but Summer is among the hardest, I think. We’re told it should be a time of ease and freedom - sitting in the park all day, drinking in the sun, city breaks - but, for an ill person, it’s just that many more things to say no to, or to cancel. I suppose I could remind myself that going on holiday is an immense privilege, and that not doing it is probably good for the environment or my purported belief in degrowth. In reality, I just have fomo, and want desperately for my partner to have the kind of Summer she once could.

This latest bout of her illness has been tough - there are relapses within the relapse - and the last few weeks have been especially hard for her. The challenge now is to remind ourselves how much we have, and to focus on the small things that still make life good - friends and takeaways and a nice home and each other. Yes we can’t go much further than our street right now, but that’s something, that’s enough. 

(*I don’t think of myself as a bongo guy, but this episode did foreshadow an experience I would have some twenty years later when I attended a house party without really knowing anyone and found myself trapped in a drum circle in the attic for the best part of an hour. Perhaps the bongo is something that chooses you.)

Cultural Indigestion 

Some stuff I’ve engaged with.

Listening to - Multitudes by Feist. Feist is one of those artists I never really think about until a new album comes out and then I listen to obsessively for weeks. This one almost passed me by completely but now it’s got its claws in. Lots of it is just the kind of lowkey melodic stuff she’s always been good at, but now with a bit of Björk-esque weirdness folded in.

Watching - Not exactly bang up to date on this one but we recently rewatched Notes on a Scandal (2006) and it was even better than I remembered. A basically perfect example of the 90-minute film. Super tight focus, not single line of dialogue wasted. The acting is great, the characterisation is nuanced, and the messaging is ambiguous. So good ten stars.

Playing - I’ve just started playing the new(ish) God of War game. Silly boisterous fun with the right amount of attention payed to character and narrative to give you a reason to carry on. Also just looks fantastic and I’m basic.