Only the magpie and I could have been capable of planning a trip to the seaside during the worst possible weather event of the year so far. However, I was dying to get out of Ghent and we were eager to take advantage of a weekend free of commitments. So we decided to go, come hail, rain and wind – or, as it turned out, all three.
Our destination was the small Flemish seaside resort town called Koksijder, where the magpie’s parents owned a small holiday apartment with a sea view that they usually rented out to visitors. I knew from my other excursion to the Flemish seaside – also precipitated by that desire to touch and reach out towards the outer limits of something, in Katzand – that it would not necessarily be the most picturesque experience. The Flemish coastline is notoriously built-up, with modern developments that are quickly snapped up by urban retirees or families belonging to Northern Belgium’s considerable middle-class. But somehow, having grown up in the UK, anticlimactic excursions to twee or insipid beach towns felt comfortingly familiar.
As I expected, the tram journey from De Panne – which veined its way along a succession of seaside towns – revealed not the open stretches of coastline that I had only half expected but a threaded-together seaside megatropolis. Quick flashing visions of grey sand and ravaged waters between buildings were the exception rather than the rule. But I didn’t mind, because I was with the magpie — even if there was something laughable about this off-season trip to the seaside and the deserted clothes shops lining empty town high streets or the casinos with doors bolted shut. We were in post-modern, post-defiled nature; in Bordieu’s America – a place where a landscape had been commoditised, exploited and finally, abandoned.
What was I really in search of? Loneliness, to be alone with him. Writing this makes me think of a wonderful passage that Jonathan Franzen pens down in the preface to his collection of essays How to Be Alone. There is a difference between loneliness and solitude he asseverates:
Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
However, I also just wanted to go on holiday, on holiday with Lukas to the seaside. The jolly silly optimism of this wish tickled me; it was childishly, simply true.
Literally translated Koksijder means ‘cuttlefish bay’. True to form, the beach beyond the windows of our apartment was abundantly strewn with the little white skeletons of long-dead fish. I remember the brittle crunch and crack of their shells beneath my boots and the soft, chalk-like texture of their internal armoury pressed beneath my finger-tips. On the first outing to the beach – once we had deposited the guitar and baggage in the apartment – we jumped across the capillary-system of small coastal burns that laced the seashore – infringing beyond the boundaries of their wave-like brothers. I saw a forlorn star-like shape, waving crumpled arms in one of these illusive sand-coloured streams. A starfish! I cried. I picked it up. It stung me. We laughed. We collected shells, ate sandwiches on the sand dunes – did the normal things.
I was pleasantly surprised by his parent’s DVD collection. I explored it at leisure that evening. It was exactly the medley of precocious European cinema that I expected from such an educated couple. There was some documentaries on the history of the area – an area rich in history, as it turns out, largely due to its proximity to Dunkirk – whose strategic position on the coast between mainland Europe and Britain, had once determined the fate of a European war. Then there were some rom-coms – and then, Casanova by Fellini.
Since my apprenticeship to Italian neo-Realist cinema and the great Northern Italian cinematic auteur Pasolini in 2012, I had always loved Italian cinema. My favourite Fellini film had been Amarcord though La Strada had also touched me. But Casanova appealed to me at that time for a number of reasons: it resonated with the romantic sub-text of the trip, but also because our delightful flatmate Artay, the part-time actor, had recently starred as lead in a modern interpretation of the film. Casanova it was.
Symbolised by the crowing of the mechanical cuckoo, the extended, lyrical passages of the film’s magic-surrealism, was what made it so memorable. This orgiastic optical brilliance was a wonderful example of cinematically reconciling form to content. I loved it all: the campness, Donald Sutherland’s British-dramatic bravura, its latent (though occasionally tenuous engagement with feminism), and the exaggerated costumes, which were, like the film itself, daring, unconventional and bizarre in the extreme. As the young, Neoplatonist Casanova fornicated with the virile urgency of a young buck – first a nun, then a cadaverous young girl prone to fainting, then a run-away beauty dressed as a young squire, Lukas sighed and yawned, we drank our wine, he fell asleep. I felt locked away, hidden in a secret place no one could ever find me. The gas fire twinkled, the black ocean beyond the French window churned in a frenzy of turbulent activity, two dog-walkers passed below on the street. The flag outside our window that quickly became my anemometer, was so tortured by the strength of opposing gales that it became almost still.
It can sometimes be the case, that a holiday or short trip nominally intended to be about discovering the ‘great outdoors’ or the history of an area, slowly but surely accepts its true fate, adjust its expectations and accepts a lesser version of itself. But here, for once, I was not ashamed about my decision to spend most of the weekend indoors. It was irresistible: while wind and rain ripped and tore along the coast, there we were, held on a magical island of inactivity, within the bounds of a semi-luxurious apartment, where time had no meaning at all.
I meant to write that weekend – of course I did not. Chicken was finished (my piece on Sickert) and I felt at leisure to track the magpie’s passions. So we learnt about gypsy jazz, I learned some barrier swing chords with a lot of flats and minors and we both learnt about the basic concept of rhythm guitar and the crucial role played by la pompe. The pumper, the water pumper, the rhythm-pumper. Lukas also introduced me to some great manouche legends. All in all it was a weekend of grand musical education which extended beyond just the guitar. Lukas showed me some wonderful clips of the great female British-American jazz icon Marian McPartland playing honky tonk in a string of pearls, looking to all intents and purposes as prim as a member of the royal family. We disagreed about Bill Evans, I liked his philsophy of ‘displacement’ and the many-petalled contusions (Lukas didn’t);. we agreed about Horace Silver… I was learning, the magpie was showering months of hard-earned jazz knowledge onto me for want of a better audience, and it all slowly slipped in between smoked-salmon sandwiches, glasses of red wine and the strange assortment of herbal teas I found in the parental tea closet.
Eventually we did make it to Dunkirk – just in case you were wondering. We were so close to the French border that it would have been a pity not to. The original plan was to walk from Belgium to France and back again, but then, given the inclement weather, and the sudden, violent downpours of rain and hail, we opted for the chat with a gregarious French bus-driver instead. The French coast was far more beautiful than the Flemish: more dishevelled, less developed, more forgiving in general. But then I knew it would be. Imagine Brighton Rock without the rock and moules frites instead. Then Dunkirk: a friendly brasserie, a broken umbrella, some historic boats moored in a harbour; the yellowing, stunted grass beside the walkway to the sea. That was all we had time for.
All in all not a big-deal weekend – perhaps nothing to speak of; just the kind of average thing that couples do. Except we were not a couple, and never would be. We were friends, lovers, fellow musicians, sometimes – why not be honest? – enemies. But for those few days the only tempests that raged were the ones outside. Inside, next to the fire, behind the window, before the screen, after the dinner we were disciples in search of the same thing: company in solitude.
833 words a day 