Home part 1

Home Time Part 1: Pre-Islay

 

When I reached terminal 5 at Heathrow airport, I have to say I instantly felt scruffy. We never look our best after early morning flights, and in a terminal surrounded by chic business commuters and other people who can afford to travel BA, I felt positively tramp-like. So one of the first things I did once back on British soil was, aside the obligatory Sunday Observer, go straight into Accessorize and buy a new pair of tights to replace my worn out jersey churridars. After I had them on I felt infinitely better and cleaner. I wandered terminal five for quite a while. I am resolved to fly BA home in May, as this is just too nice a welcome home to spare for the sake of thirty quid.

When I got back to Glasgow airport, I was incredibly excited. Speaking to my mum and dad and Iain on British telephone lines was exciting enough. When you come down the lifts to the baggage reclaim you can see the arrivals greeters outside. And they were there: the family and Iain, waving crazily. I could hardly stand it and practially ran to get my bag, but sod’s law, they were amongst the last to get off the trolley. Mum told me later that I had been gone so long Iain was anxious and kept saying “Where is she? Where is she? It can’t take this long…maybe she went the wrong way…” When I finally was reunited with them I had to take the executive decision between crying mother and crying boyfriend and went for my mother. She is the person who gave birth to me afterall, and also the person I am most careful not to offend for fear. Being able to see them again was one of the happiest moments I have had in a long long time. Iain was crying. It was incredibly touching. Even Euan looked more than happy to see me. Once I had hugged and kissed everyone we went home to our house and I had my first taste of bagel with melted Red Leicester cheese. Amazing. It was beyond words how wonderful it was to see them all. I was so knackered though I don’t think I was much good at conversation. My mum told me I looked gaunt and that my hair had definitely thinned. Wonderful to hear. Apparently I am a lot thinner than I had realised. Even my pyjamas were a bit baggy, and they are elasticated.

The next day, irony of all ironies, I spent running to the loo. I got food poisoning in Terminal five from Wagamammas. Goddamn noodle soup… this was made worse by the fact that I had to do a grand tour and visit all of my relatives. By the time I was coming home from Gran and Grandpa’s I thought I wasn’t going to make the twenty minute journey back. I almost didn’t.

Seeing everyone again was amazing. I gave out everyone’s gifts and so on and they were all happy. Old Gran was especially pleased to see me I think. We are going for lunch with her on Wednesday, and I cant wait. Grandpa was hilariously trying hard not to tell me that I was as brown as a (insert racist term here).

At first it was a bit annoying. Everyone had school and work and all my friends were sitting exams in Edinburgh. So I was kicking about the house a bit. It was amazing to see Susan again. Her mother died right before I came home, so I was feeling particularly glad to see her and finally give her a cuddle. But I had arranged with my mum to go for lunch with Old Gran on Wednesday. When it came, we took her into the town and to Fifi and Ally for champagne high tea. They have beautiful presentation: a lovely white vintage tea tray thing with berries and cream arranged around it, not that it wasn’t appetizing enough already. She hadn’t been in the town for about fifteen years she said. It was a great day to be in. The sky was clear, the Christmas lights were all up on Buchanan Street and everything was looking festive and clean for once. I have to say, picking this time of year to come back to Scotland was a brilliant idea. She was a bit overwhelmed by it all, but we got her back in one piece.

 That evening I went through to Edinburgh to see all of my friends and spend some time with Iain. They were all in the flat to greet me, and it felt lovely to see them all again together. Frances had come all the way from Italy. She is a doll and I was so happy to see her. I was surprised to learn that this was the first time in quite a while any of them had been round at the flat. But more on that one later. Kapil even made a curry in the spirit of the occasion.
The next day Iain had to go do some work for his courses (more on that one later as well) so I went out to meet Robin for coffee in the morning. It was lovely to see him again and catch up. Seems he is becoming quite the armed forces party boy. After meeting Robin I went to the library and saw my boo and Rachel again for a little while, before repairing to Emma’s for Christmas market time.

Every year in Edinburgh there is a German Christmas market at the National Galleries on Princes Street. And every year, there is mulled wine and a man who happily gives stolen (German Christmas cake) away for free. I bought some to bring back to India with me and make everyone in the hostel try. It is one of the most amazing things in the world. o fruity and heavy and yum. We bought some mulled wine spices as well to make later on. Cannot wait. Ran from the Christmas Market to Starbucks to meet Iain Alex. I hadn’t seen him either and so was overjoyed to see him. Gave him his Om UV t-shirt. I hope he actually wears the damned thing seeing as it took a total of four flights to get it to him. Time was cut short however as had to go to see Peter Pan with Frances at the Lyceum (you can pack a LOT in a day if you just try). About twenty minutes in, Frances leaned over and asked me what a pantomime is. I could hardly believe it. I hate panto, but I had gone with her as she had been so insistent and she had come all the way from Italy for it after all. This was a classy panto as well, with proper wires for people to fly, no has-been comedians and no ‘Buttons’ or ‘Widow Twanky’ characters. But she didn’t like it. I think she was too hyped up for the real play of Peter Pan, not something where everyone sounds like they are from Leith and small children yell out at random points and the story line is effectively brutalized. I enjoyed her reaction more than the production.

After the panto, (gosh wasn’t I festive?) I went back to Emma’s to have mulled wine. Iain Alex joined us and we watched Dil Bole Hadippa! A wonderful film that is effectively the Indian version of She’s The Man. I have converted them to Bollywood. Now I will have support when Kapil goes on one of his rants about Bollywood.

The next morning I got up super early and Frances and I went back to Glasgow to meet my mother for lunch. We went to Rogano and sat in the bar, had champagne cocktails and amazing fish soup with rouille and croutons. The coffee with tablet there is one of the things I look forward to most about being back home with the rents. The family were really pleased to see Frances again as well, as they think she is the bee’s knees. She brought various exciting chocolate products as well from `Italy, so she couldn’t have gone wrong. Mum made a huge dinner of beef Wellington as well, the right way this time thankfully. My stomach decided to revolt on that one the next morning as well, but it was well worth the half hour I had to spend on the loo. I find it so ironic that being at home made me sick twice in one week – far more frequent than in Delhi.

The next day Frances and I spent in Glasgow looking for snow boots and going to see Where The Wild things are. I enjoyed the soundtrack and James Gandolfini as the voice of Carol. I didn’t really get the inane squee that many other people seem to have gotten though, as I had never read the book as a kid so I don’t think I was in the right frame of mind. But oh well. I still enjoyed it, just not as much as Frances. Afterwards we went back through to Edinburgh. She left for Italy the next morning. I was sad to see her go, but not as horrifically upset as last time. Saying goodbye to folks does get easier as it goes along.

I came back to Glasgow on Monday. For the next five days I stayed in Glasgow. I saw Grace again for the first time in a long while. We drank obscene amounts of tea. Tea is becoming a definite feature of the different stages of my day. Went round to Susan’s for dinner as well and had pasta for the first time since late October or something. Most exciting. I met my Grandmother and we went shopping together as we always do in the week before Christmas and got an ace leather jacket from topshop. Once again, I began to feel slightly bored…I was left at home with not much to do. But I managed to fill my time in somehow.

The next installment is: Islay. Where the whiskey comes from.

Installment 1: Goa

Lauren and I went to Goa together for five days at the end of semester. We stayed in a beach shack guesthouse called Hotel Paradise at Anjuna beach, of 1970s and 80s acid parties fame. Goa is a beautiful place. The coastline is fairly unspoilt, bar a few petrochemical plants (just swim up stream!) and the towns are few and far between. There are not too many cars, as most people prefer mopeds to negotiate the windy, single-track roads and byways. Unlike most of India, the Catholic presence in Goa is far more evident: in the little immaculate white churches, in the roadside shrines covered, ironically, in marigold garlands, in the terraced town houses. All the people we met from Goa itself were good natured, happy, and anxious that we should see Goa as the tropical paradise it really was. There are a lot of white people living in Goa. Possibly they are relics from the acid days, and you can tell just from speaking to some of them, that this is not a prejudiced assumption. Instead of detailing each day, I will try to summarise the things that stuck out most in my mind about the trip:

1.   The sea food. I know I think about food a lot. It is generally one of the things on my mind at nearly all hours of the day. And, having lived on pretty much vegetable soup, radish and lauki salad and porridge for a month beforehand (so depressing), the sea food in Goa was an incredible prospect. On our second night we had a whole lobster each, cooked to perfection in garlic butter, for under ten pounds. I had tiger prawns and calamari, all fresh from the sea that day, all cooked to perfection. Anjuna beach is typically very busy with tourists in the high season, but in early December it is perfect. There aren’t too many tourists, and so there is more availability of fish, and the prices are lower. I don’t think I had eaten so well in the four months I had been here. Not only that, fresh fruit juice was everywhere, there were ladies selling coconuts on the beach for 15-20 Rs a pop, and loads of stuff was vegan/vegetarian and, above all, fresh. That one week restored my faith in food.

2.   The drug casualties. There were groups of middle-aged to aging men and women on the beach, all looking a bit too brown for their own good. They all wore ridiculous clothes. One man I saw in a red cloth thong (I was later horrified to find out he came from Scotland). Women tended to wear incredibly tight mini dresses and biker boots. There were a lot of biker boots. And everyone had that ‘rave’ style clothing: halfway between hippy and acid house, with long elfin hoods and zigzag hemlines. One older man came up to us on the beach and just stared at Lauren as if she was an alien and then yelled “Oh my GOD! You are SO WHITE!!” He then proceeded to tell us about his history book that would help rewrite a lot of modern history and solve various conspiracy theories. He even invited us back to his beach shack. We ran away to the other end of the beach to avoid him. Another man, a little younger and a lot sleazier, asked me if I knew what exactly I was taking a photograph of (a palm tree filled beach scene to make everyone at home incredibly jealous, or so I thought). I said no, I had no idea it was famous for anything in particular. He told me that I was taking photographs of one of the most famous party places in the world, and that once he had known several thousand people to party there at once. “Even Dr Hoffman attended,” he said sagely, expecting me to be impressed with these higher echelons of partying. He was less smug when I told him I had no idea who Dr Hoffman was. I hope it made him feel old. Or at least, too old to be hitting on me. On a different occasion, Lauren and I saw an old woman wandering the beach in purple tie-dye spandex looking a bit too dazed and confused. She was a sorry sight. A lot of people obviously just stayed in Anjuna. And why not? It is beautiful and has so much of what they love. Every single beach bar plays awful trance every day, all day, in homage to the Glory Days.

3.   The beaches. They were beautiful. Everything the Bounty advert had promised came true. They were smooth, palm tree-lined stretches of golden sand. The water was warm enough to go in without flinching. The heat of the day meant you had to get in to swim just to cool off. There were hardly any rocks, and hardly any seaweed. All you had to watch out for were lots of little hermit crabs that were washed up in the surf. Every beach had its quotient of beach shack restro-bars, all playing either trance or Bob Marley. The latter was generally preferable. Each restro-bar had its own sun loungers, so you could sit and order from the comfort of your lounger and someone could watch your stuff when you went in swimming. Patrolling the beach are men and women, all selling something or other. Many of the women are carrying great baskets on their heads with pineapples and coconuts inside. They give you the coconut with the top hacked off so that you can drink the water, and then they will hack it up again so that you can eat the cream inside. Other women are carrying huge bags of jewelry hidden within the folds of their saree. We eventually caved into these and bought one anklet each off two different women, to try and be fair. The women would approach you and introduce themselves and then tell me that my friend was “White like chicken!” or “White like milk!” (sense a theme?). They would warn me in strong tones: “You are sister? No sister…well…your friend, she is so white, like milk. You must keep her out of sun. Very dangerous for her. You must do this.” A few of them were incredibly wily and funny women. One sticks out in my mind called Tanya, who sat and talked with us for about half an hour on everything and anything and somehow managed to steer the conversation to her anklets every thirty seconds and then would giggle when we tried to avoid the question. The men wandering about gave massages. I have to say, some were a bit too enthusiastic to give massages to us, but some were just plying a trade. I witnessed one incredibly fat and hairy man covered in gold jewelry and a huge moustache in just his underwear getting rubbed down by some poor little old man. It was more than slightly horrifying.

4.   I had my first Ayurvedic massage. Not by a wee man on the beach, but in a salon called the Orange Salon in the Villa Anjuna hotel. It was very nice and relaxing, though the woman laughed at me for asking if I should take my bikini top off or not. It was also a bit more than awkward when, once finished, they sat us both in a steam room together to drip for a while and then led us to a shower together too. When we got in the steam room, it was incredibly awkward and we just had to laugh to keep from imploding with the ridiculousness of it all.  I had never envisaged that Lauren and I’s friendship would take such a personal turn. Apparently this always happens to her, a naked embarrassing moment, and I should have known better. Ah well. Nothing I haven’t seen before.

 

By the time we left Goa, there was a noticeable increase in the amount of Brits on Tour. I think I wouldn’t have liked it so much if it had been too busy. On the Wednesday it was the flea market in Anjuna. People from all over the state come for it, and it is a major tourist attraction. Stalls selling spices, teas, cheap rave clothes, designer leather goods, and every kind of jewelry you could think of, all shouted for attention. It was quite overwhelming. I got Iain a silver cuff for his Christmas, but we eventually had to leave and go get in the water just so that we could escape the bustle. The other issue we had was that there was no street lighting or beach lighting in Anjuna. To get to a beach bar for dinner, one would have to walk across a good stretch of unlit beach: not something recommended for young women. If only there had been some more lighting, I am sure our stay would have been perfect. We were knackered by the time we left. We hadn’t had much sleep, not due to partying, but due to the beach shack we stayed in. it had a thatched roof. You could hear every little shuffle of tiny feet in the night. It might have been geckos. It might have been mice, Worse, it might have been rats, cockroaches, or snakes. We didn’t know. All we knew was that occasionally there would be a scuttling sound right above our heads, or in the bathroom, that would freak us right out and make it impossible to sleep for fear that as soon as you closed your eyes a snake would drop onto your face and a rat would munch on your toes. I was sad to leave Goa. It was a tropical paradise. You could see why it is becoming an incredibly popular place for tour packages. The perfect dose of winter sun, cheap and good food and parties.

I think if I went back though it would be about the same time. It was the relaxation post-exams that I needed before heading home for Christmas. I was completely ready to go home. I have been looking forward to it for weeks and weeks. It is not that I don’t like it here. I do. I was just ready to go home. To see the family. See Iain. My friends. Glasgow in December rain. The German Christmas Market. Things you don’t think you will miss, like cheese. (Real cheese is non-vegetarian, and paneer doesn’t count as real cheese.) Home time will be my next installment.

BACK BACK BACK

Well, apologies are necessary I guess. I completely ignored this thing throughout my Christmas holiday, despite having some interesting experiences that I am fairly sure I could share and no one would be too bored by it. So in the coming days, I will devote one blog entry per Awesome Moment and we will see if that does the elapsed time some justice.