You’ve been a long way away. Thank you for coming back to me.

For the past fortnight, or so, I have been back on the beautiful island of Sri Lanka. This place has been a revelation. Truth told, I had been largely indifferent about factoring the country into my travel plans and I am very glad of being talked into visiting by OH.

This second visit in as many months has been very different to the first- less of the here, there and everywhere adventures; less touristy visits; quieter; and much more reflective… without veering (too much) into the perilous loneliness of unending introspection. In short, it’s been marvellous.

My thoughts, naturally, are beginning to turn to my return to the rocks in the middle of the Atlantic but I remain, as ever, resistant to going back to life as it was. I can’t really, and I am confident that it won’t. I do probably need to figure out what comes next- beyond getting the last of my midlife crisis patches with some long-wanted tattoos, getting a full motorcycle license, and maybe taking up the guitar. I don’t think fully adopting divorced dad energy is a compelling career path. But that can wait at least until Autumn or until I gamble and drink away what money I have left.

Maybe it can’t wait…

Just one more thing: Colombo

I have set up shop in the alcove of a wonderful couple’s house in Colombo and it’s been nice to feel a touch more of the old home-sweet-home feel that I was able to claim in Nepal. It’s a stunning house. My hosts are generous with their time, and their food. Jimmy is a drive time morning radio host and Roshi… well, I’m not entirely sure what she does but she seems to be very important and is gone most of the day. If it were possible, I’d like to take their courtyard home with me.

The weather in Colombo, and across the island, is decidedly different from only two months ago as we head into the monsoon season. The humidity, at times, is off the charts and the storms are spectacular. The blasts of lightning, the explosions of thunder, and the heavy thud of the rainfall more than matches that which I experienced in Nepal.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time back in Colombo reading, walking, swimming, and jotting the odd thing. I’ve daily made camp at a beautiful beach spot about a two mile walk along the sands from my home. This week marked the first time I have seen red flags at the beach front. Having made friends with the lifeguards posted at that end of the beach, I was sensible enough (for once in my life) to indicate to them each time I headed into the surf and to ‘keep an eye’. I’m glad I did- I’ve never felt a rip tide like it. Each fleeting pause, a moment taken to catch my breath, saw me pulled 20 or 30 yards down the coast. Swimming against the tide was exhausting and on each of the times I waded into the water on those red flag days, I only managed 5 minutes of swimming against the current before I dragged myself, panting heavier than usual, back onto the beach.

Similarly, I’ve managed, despite the humidity and the ‘feels like temperatures’ of 38 odd degrees (totally meaningless number if you ask me. The meteorologists equivalent of ‘expected goals. Honestly- what does it all mean Basil?!) to also develop something of a frequent running schedule.

Didn’t it rain: Jaffna

Time and schedule didn’t allow for a visit to the high north of Sri Lanka on my earlier visit, and heading to Jaffna was a big motivator for this return trip. So last week, braving the storm battering the capital and seeing a 5am start for the first time in months (if not the first time I’ve seen 5am this trip) I arrived at Colombo fort station for my 8ish hour train north.

A couple of things to note/confess here. Firstly, alongside ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, ‘Brief Encounter’ is one of my favourite films of all time. It’s class. The Colombo fort station, the rain, the age of the trains all put me in mind of that glorious, gorgeous cinematic classic. I often spend my life thinking I am in one of those two films, what with my not being ‘all there’, and waiting for the train really felt like I was in the picture. Glorious. The second thing to note, as I think I have elsewhere in these pages, is that I proper love trains. So, the thought of spending 8 hours seeing the country on one was a source of excitement, not dread. And I was not disappointed- the landscapes are stunning. The mountains overlooking fields of rice before plunging deep into the jungle will stay with me for a long time.

I was very surprised at how geographically small Jaffna is and less surprised at how little has been built up there. I suppose the initial surprise comes with the fact that the place has been hugely significant in the recent years of Sri Lanka as the heartland of the Tamil side of the Civil War. There are no museums or (official) monuments to the Civil War, or the losses suffered by the Tamil people. It was not something one spoke about, but I did my best to learn some basic Tamil words. The fort, one of the largest in the country, is being excavated and rebuilt following extensive shelling but there is next to no acknowledgement on the information boards as to why such excavation and archaeological work is required. I was thrilled to have read the fantastic ‘This Divided Island’ by Samanth Subramanian on my first day in Jaffna to really put all I was seeing in context.

The people of Jaffna were all incredibly kind and welcoming. I got caught for a good two hours in a deluge and taking shelter in a fabulous waterfront church, I had a clumsy conversation in broken English and even more broken Tamil with a couple of worshippers. When out running, everyone shouted encouraging (though probably sarcastic) words in English and what I am assuming were encouraging words in Tamil. One elderly gentleman, utterly perplexed as to what I was running to or from, cycled alongside me insisting that I climb on the front of his bike and give me a lift. When finally, I think exasperated with me, he asked why I was running and I replied ‘because I am fat’ he simply looked down at my stomach, nodded, and cycled off.

I’d like to return to the north of Sri Lanka, to the wider region around Jaffna, and explore it even further.

Wash up

I’ve read a bucket load over the last fortnight with fabulous books covering Sri Lanka, Nepal, and India. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Australia feel like a lifetime ago. There is so much more to learn and explore about these places, not least of all because the process of truth and reconciliation is still being resisted by the powers that be in many of these places. Many of the struggles, particularly in India, are not just live but accelerating.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been reading:

• ‘In the margins of Empires’ by Akhilesh Upadhyay: Rubbish. Absolute bloody rubbish. Huge chunks of quotations without footnotes or sources; contradictory claims from one paragraph to the next; endless repetition (bit of a brass neck for me to critique somebody else for that). Could have been a cracking pamphlet or long essay on the geopolitical status of Nepal and the Himalayas located as they are between India and China. This book? Pants.
• ‘The Tutor of History’ by Manjushree Thapa: A fabulous piece of fiction about the campaign for parliamentary elections in the small town of Khaireni Tar. Utterly gripping narrative with complex and compelling characters. Really great. Will be reading again I am sure.
• ‘Jangalnama: Travels in a Maoist Guerilla Zone’ by Satnam: A journalistic take on two months spent by the author with the Maoist guerillas in India. A pacy and interesting read although not as deeply analytical or questioning of motives and actions as I would have liked.
• ‘This Divided Island’ by Samanth Subramanian: A non-fiction look at the Sri Lankan civil war with a focus on interviews with combatants, and ordinary people, on both sides of the divide. A really great read that is in depth, considered, and challenging.
• ‘Quichotte’ by Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie is the GOAT. This book is amazing. I didn’t so much read it as devour it. I’m trying very hard to keep leaving books behind and not building back up another collection, having only recently got rid of several hundred books from my dad’s loft. Books like this, and ‘The Tutor of History’, are making that effort difficult.
• ‘Mad Country’ a collection of short stories by Samrat Upadhyay: A very smart, pacy collection short stories, some of which were more satisfying than others. Good read.

I’ve also finished Resident Evil VIII, a proper Resi, and am now playing through the remakes. What a cultural life eh?  

This afternoon I head back south to Galle for a couple of nights, before a nature retreat on a lake in Bentota, complete with my own kayak. So that’ll be fun.

And finally… I also note the ongoing shit show that is politics and governance in the UK. God I hate being right on things like this (aka the rise of fascism) but there was a decent chunk of folks, including myself, warning six months before the UK General Election that swept them to power that the rise of Reform would be the inevitable conclusion of electing a bunch of hacks whose only political driver was to ‘get the adults back in the room’ and for them to be the said adults. Starmer and the Labour party have sown; it will be the rest of us forced to reap.