Newsletter Number Three
Bird feeding, (watching) surfing 60 foot waves, Experiments on Reality and a travelogue gone wrong.
Hi all,
Apologies for the lateness again, my week having been susceptible to the general madness of world goings-on, as I’m sure many of you were. I was also working on something exciting which I’ll hopefully be able to share with you next week. The world continues to change and there might be some more changes here in the near future but for now, I’m glad to say there’s more of the same. It’s late so I’ll try to be brief, and hope ye enjoy this week’s articles over the week. And as always, if you enjoy them then please share them around.
This week’s book is by Tim Robinson, an honorary citizen of Connemara. I originally bought this book on a whim in a bookstore, spending thirty seconds looking at the offerings in what must have been the travel section, and deciding I liked the look of it. I suggest you do the same when you’re buying your books.
A series of synchronicities followed the original purchase of the book, one of which of the tragic kind, as he passed away a couple of months later. My finally getting around to reading it was the latest one, as for me it’s been one of those books that I always knew I needed to read but couldn’t figure out what it was. Robinson’s writing has inspired me somewhat, or perhaps more accurately, it’s the kind of writing that ‘allows’ its readers to further explore their own creativity in its manners, a sort of artistic granting of permission that ultimately no-one needs.
And so this week’s travel article (the most important ones remember), we stay in Ba Be Lake in northern Vietnam (don’t confuse the title with last week’s one!), this time with a different retelling of events. I’ve been trying to write a series of pieces based on this trip (don’t worry, I didn’t stay there forever, and we’ll be leaving next week), and elements of this piece have existed since I went there, almost two years ago. There are many different ways to tell the same story, and reveal different aspects of it – this is totally unrelated and separate to current allegations of ‘fake news’, distortions of facts, and misrepresentation of data for different purposes. But ultimately, truth is separate to fact, and fiction is often far more true than factual accounts.
This week’s article is an homage of sorts to Tim Robinson’s writing, which mixes story, essay, travelogue, memoir and even dubious narrative of auto-fiction – to highlight different aspects of the truth of existence, which is ultimately what stories are about. In writing about travel but I’ve little interest in writing any more Top 5 Things to Do In Vietnam articles (unless someone needs travel tips!). It’s also impossible to separate the objective experience from the subjective, and to do so results in writing which is ignorant of local culture, condescending to the reader, and frankly a waste of my time.
So what started as a simple travelogue giving a straightforward factual account of Ba Be National Park, has turned into something entirely useless for a potential visitor in a practical sense, but maybe valuable in other senses. I’ve mixed a highly subjective account of an almost scientific perspective of my view of the lake; an excerpt of narrative from a computer game, some abstract philosophising on the nature of time, and a tangentially related thought I had while listening to a podcast. I’ll let you figure it out for yourselves. This is another experiment, and I’d love to know what you think.
And finally, more surfing. I can’t surf right now so I suppose I’m just theorising for now, hopefully it isn’t long before I can integrate it into more real accounts of surf trips. Despite the darkening weather, winter’s when the fun starts, if the subject of this week’s article is anything to go by.
Enjoy, and as always, please share or hit subscribe. Thanks.
Gav
This week’s articles: