Edinburgh, D’Artagnan and the three musketeers.

The title comes up to my mind reading the first text of the first day when, set the time on the watch and put the smashing boot – yes, of course…boots! Always true to form – on the Caledonian ground, my mother asks me “How are you? Are you fine? What about the flight? …And your three musketeers???”. 

Automatically I smile and I feel I’m a little D’Artagnan.

Like in my little girl-wishes. 

 

Just the time to tidy up dreams.

The time to stop the memories, since the most beautiful travel is that one that doesn’t end. 

 

Edinburgh astonished me with its houses substantially as black as the craws on the trees of the cemetery, where the gravestones stoop to the wind and to the sun of those thousands seasons, that usually alternate and switch during just one hour.

That freezing air shouts against you, while you are whistling “Scotland the brave” for inertia, while you’re walking striving to go on, held up by something that is probably more than a draught at your shoulders.

We were there, on the Castle’s hill, contemplating the perfectly faded clouds running over the Firth of Forth, drying out our lips from the rain, exploring the ravines in the rock, where Man mingles with ground and where the sign of an old presence hides among the veins of a wooden door. 

And, for us, mixed in a palette of bad and fine weather, the umbrella is an useless frill always ready to betray you: it turns upside down, like a sock.

While, about the climbs, which still I can’t believe they can be also slopes, tiredness is so heavy that you can’t do anything else than laughing.

Without thinking too much. And some beer, in all this process, helps you. 

Pub is a parallel life in Scotland, the “hereafter” of the day. The young man and the old one, of every kind, sit side by side, elbow to elbow – bending them time to time – on the same bench, at the same bar.

And…while I marvel at the endless bottles behind the waitress…Someone else prefers to upgrade the sensations and satisfy the throat.

Even if the liver could lodge some complaints.

Scotland and music are one soul.

I left for two days of festival and I came back realizing that the festival is just always and everywhere.

Scotsmen hide rolls in their blood, besides in Karen’s voice (I spent more than one hour to understand Orkneys’ accent) and it has also succeeded in infecting José Gonzales, visibly foster Scotsman, but perfectly fitting with that little old man with no name who concluded his evening with a glorious exploit of folk dance, after putting down the last one of I-do-not-know-how-many thousands whiskeys on a barrel suddenly become table.

Anyway, the stroke was mine in clapping the hands to give him the rhythm. 

Our little alcove in the neoclassical area can be recognized at the glace for the two black black lanterns on the white wall. As white as the April sky of Milan, since to compare white to snow has become, nowadays, rather banal. And we couldn’t escape from the rite, maybe a too British one ‘round here, of the invite to taste tea in our narrow pad, making the most of the water-boiler from the “tea and coffee facilities”, according to the holy religion of survivor-travelling.

But “With a milk dusting, please”.

The hands upon the harp, and one hundred harps around my hands, the tiny kind old lady who does her best to show us the way, the cannonball I look for even if it doesn’t exist, the craved tartan hat and the bus driver congratulating for its colours, the pipers and “Scotland the brave”, by then perpetually even in our dreams, scent of pipe and tobacco, your smiles and those of mine.

Nights and days spent to invent gibberishes…so “Neandertalish” ones!

Fragrance of beer and salmon taste: now I wouldn’t eat anything else…

 

Your drawings while in the plane and your funny faces.

Long curly hair.

Scent of pipe and of pencil.

 

Your word-of-mouth thoughts and your talks.

Sky blue eyes.

Scent of pipe and of printed pages.

 

The caresses to my tired legs and the waves of your hair, where my hands get lost and have been getting lost since always…they are almost black.

Just like that rock where the Castle lays.

 

My memories, enchained to the heart.

And the travel won’t ever end.

 

[Edinburgh, Scotland; March the 27th - April the 1st 2008]

Travels, ink and footmarks on the sand.

…For the same reason of the travel:

to travel.

(Fabrizio De André, in “Khorakhané”)

I have never loved departures.

I realize that I have been repeating, writing and even recording it for days.

And thinking to the end of this wonderful experience that is Erasmus, just after coming back from the airport to say “goodbye” to a pair of eyes again taking flight, of course is not helping me to give positivity to my thoughts. 

But, it isn’t useful to deny the obvious…I’ve really never loved them. Neither when we are meaning a white sheet on which you should start to print your chains of thoughts. But, on the other side, is true that I’ve never been able to renounce to leave, as well. And to write too.

In such a kind of masochistic vertigo I’ve always found myself on the way and with a pen in my hands, looking for…well, neither I do know what. Maybe trying to seek out new words to tell. And to tell about me. 

A dear friend of mine, left and never come back (no, I don’t want to make it tragic: he just found love and decided to stay elsewhere) was mentioning me about the danger of the “Germ of the Travel”. When it bites you, it infects you…and you can’t do without it anymore.

 Actually, nothing is more true. I become more and more aware of that day by day, moreover realizing that this marvellous adventure has so speeded up my blood in the veins that the pressure has pushed those two passions of mine until they flooded my soul.

 And so, I’m laying down now (but just for the moment!) on a greenish definitely post-soviet style sofa in my cosy Estonian apartment, trying to make order in the streams of consciousness of my crazy mind.

In front of me there’s a keyboard, efficient surrogate of a pen, when you don’t know which sweater did it hide under; next to me, on the entropic floor, my digital reflex, with some lenses here and there; all around, Tallinn, with its pointed roofs, its blue blue sky and the memories of the now thawed snow.

And what about inside? That is the only thing I’m not sure about. Thousands and thousands of stories: original, quoted, alive and inexistent, poetical and pragmatic ones…they cross and intersect like the walks of the July crowd on a beach.

A bright mix to leave my footmarks on the sand.