Time moves like a dark freight train in the night. Birthday passed beginning of November. Then two weeks in Amsterdam. Corporate film shoot, Aviation Authority, planes, offices, interviews. Renovating my writing space/library, painting walls, archiving, dumping unnecessary stuff. Kilos of newspaper, mags. Getting lean. Ayahuasca private moment with Mano a colleague and the travelling Hilario Chiriap, the Shuar shaman from Ecuador, a proud warrior with great skills. His steel bow harp drones in a frequency deep in the Amazon.

Quick hit and run to check emails, no time to write on script, novel of weblogs. Training, Kung Fu school, different cities. Feels alien if I step back and look at the strange life I live. Meetings, some planned, some an accidental rendezvous in a bar or cafe, all walks of life, film producers, clothing wholesalers. diamond dealers just returning from Russia. Culture afficionados. Entrepreneurs with stories stranger and scarier than some fiction, some straight from the jungle of Suriname. Coincidence? Just as I’m writing my own material located there. Everything seems to fall in place. To be continued…

Last Monday, jamming after a long time with our Blut Meridian line up. Garvan’s drumming getting better, more powerful, more swinging and confident. Malcolm coming up with some badass original guitar riffs. We’re moving more into writing own songs rather than covering obscure Black Sabbath and other heavy songs. I pound on the heavy bass strings, forgetting everything else. Inspiring three hours.

Tuesday, pack, last few missions, fly off to LHR.

Wednesday, the missions continue. Lunch time, a rare moment that I switch on the TV. What the hell do I see? Hostage situations and attacks in Mumbai. Straight out of Die Hard, Taj Palace Hotel siege. Carnage at a rail station. Mumbai transformed from busy financial centre to warzone. Panic, Fear. Commandos carving their way in. Casualties. Lots of civilians. Some militants. A businessman barricades himself in the Oberoi Trident and talks live with the press. A voice from the inside in the middle of the madness. The man is admirably calm and composed, describing shots outside in his corridor, running, noise, and commotion.

As Marvin Gaye sang: What’s Going On? Worrying stuff. These things used to be incidents, now it’s all becoming a regular thing.

Then the UK government making silly decisions, lowering VAT. This will surely create a gap in the state budget and cause them to scrabble some time later to raise taxes in other areas. Many independent businesses I talk to say they should have lowered business rates and income tax instead to help survival.

As W.B. Yeats wrote in his much quoted poem, The Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

So it seems. While the majority drowns in mediocrity, disturbed and fragmented minds plot destruction and exploitation. Let’s hope all these clouded minds either clean up or destroy themselves before most of us who just want to live their lives get stuck in the middle.

And in this urban global village we’ve become that seems more difficult than ever before. Syphilization, rotting brains. Peace seems so far. But surely it will come…

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