How long does it take to read a book? All the way from Kenton-on-Sea to Wilderness.
Some excerpts from the book. Enjoyed it soooo much!
The search for the rarest bird in the world –
Vernon RL Head
I moved on a tide of humanity through queues linking people as hyphens link words...
The Amharic language was rich and pulpy, like the juice of a foreign fruit plucked fresh from a tree in a wild place - sticky to the tongue and oddly delicious.
But cities are not flowers that open naturally and live within nature; instead they expand like foreign, parasitic things that continue to take, banishing the wilderness as once they banished lepers.
We proceeded along the wide, winding serpent ever southwards towards Nechisar, contained on either side by the purple shiver on distant mountains. Midday made them rock like boats on the sky.
Our vehicle entered into a dance with the mule and the truck, in the suck of the truck the animal spun, twirling and wobbling in a tragic circle, a macabre pirouette. Then, like a gust from nowhere, the great hulk steadied itself, walking miraculously as if it were a limping dancer to the other side of the road, and began to eat from the verge like a mellow hippy. It ate immediately and nonchalantly, this hippy horse, as one might eat from habit. Then a man with dreadlocks and smoke coming from his head tapped it on the thigh, but the mule lingered like a street dog near its food.
We sat in a corrugated corner of the town, on the edge of this mess, like coffee granules stuck to the side of a cup. All about us lay a lazy choas of things that would have been easy to pick up and put right.
At times happiness is intensely private: a place of solitude and yet immense abundance.
The town of Arab Minch appeared to have slid lazily downhill. It sat like an old person, a little tired and askew but contented.
And I felt how a smile could talk.
The darkness came suddenly before I noticed the dusk, as if the sun had become the moon.
Then the moon snuggled up to a cloud and buried itself, content as a bird in its nest. The darkness was immediate.
©Vernon RL Head
