Where is the Golden Chair?

I tumbled through the carriages of the famous Moscow to Amsterdam sleeper. The Yellow carriages filled with worn Russians lead to the plush blue German carriages.

"Is this seat taken?"

"Not so far. We know you. We know you from Eisenach."

I laughed. It was the father and son who's path I had crossed more than two weeks ago, who had in parallel been cycling from Bonn to Krakow via Prague. I no longer minded the fact that I was travelling West - away from the fascinating people and outstanding landscape of Eastern Europe and away from the madness of Odessa, where Northern Europe; the Middle East and Central Asia collide exploding in vibrant colours, where sailors from across the world have for centuries been drawn in by its debauchery and which Russia has cunning shrouded from the rest of Europe by a small strip of land along the Dneister more sinister than Konigsburg-Kaliningrad, the most successful ethnic cleansing program in history.

A hotel lobby filled with seven Mafia meat heads, corrupt policemen turned back by my love for their country, struggling to pay the five cent tram fare, the full on extravagance of Deribasovskaya street next to perpetual decay, unsurpassable clubs with pillars and podiums open to the stars reflecting off the Black water, these expose a place between paradise and dark gritty reality.

It was what I travelled all this way for - to sit looking out towards Abkhazia while the late afternoon sun stroked the white sands accompanied by the Mediterranean chorus of crickets, a cushion place behind me and a cup of green tea before me.

It made it worth every moment to be sat there in the evening sharing a beer with: the owner, the Azeri from Baku with a love for life who danced with every passer by; the Turk from Istanbul with wide eyes, reduced to shreds by the completely consistent fertility of the Ukrainian women, whom he could not even pay for; my brother with whom we could deal with any situation thrown at us; and the politician from Bishkek university with a story like no other.

Osh, Issuk Kul, Epos Manus, Cambridge, Japanese total fighting, vital documents, beauty, lucky pennies, Muslim comrades... do they spell the edge of Europe?

If you are a thief then you will meet thieves

I have borrowed a pen from the teacher. I scribble all this down before we are consumed by the melting pot of Europe.

The thirteen year old woman who had been amongst those who had been sat down by their teacher to learn the previous evening came up to me,

"You are pianist. You like Bach?"

"Ja lublyo Bach", I reply.

I take out my interail map of Europe, worth very little to me, and show her my route from Odessa through Slovakia and Poland to Eisenach, the great man's birth place and back to Leipzig the great man's place of work.

I wake up to admire the swathes of dark rich fertile land that, as Thubron remarked in Eastern Ukraine could not possibly have suffered the grain crisis of the era of collective farms.

The only down side of the previous night was the cigarettes that could have torn an elephants throat to shreds. Beyond that I never laughed more than we did drinking the enormous Victor and his pensioneering comrad beneath the table.

We chew on shaslik by the river which flows from deep gorges untouched and beyond imagination to meet the mouth of the Danube.

Everywhere there is music. 12 year old enact a history with voices more mature than women and that know how to boogy.

The lights are low. The most immaculate jazz band plays by the glistening fountain and figures in the fantasy garden. Behind me a man in dark glasses and full suit before me utterly glamorous women glistening from head to toe. The garnish is a raisin in savoury sauce, juicy cherry tomatoes, grilled pineapple, a roasted wisp of carrot, lemon; the sauce is completely balanced creamy, sweet, sour and savoury; the slab of sturgeon is slowly pulverised taking my senses elsewhere while we receive respect from poised waiters for ordering Ukrainian beer and Ukrainian vodka. We try and look the part with my last sock, affixed trainers, French bum shorts and only a fleece on my upper torso. We order in broken Russian we wish them a good evening, shake our waiters hand and return to help ourselves to the mini bar and listen to Viktor Yanukovych the orator.

We bundel into the bus to another world with a string of thirty sausages. Confussion and two hours eventually lets us through the check point. At the other side we are greated by an enormous angular worker weilding a flag.

Napoleon

We reenter the hostel after being escorted through. The elderly man looks at our keys and insists on taking them back. He coughs walks around the side and appears behind the glass looking at us. He slowly slides back the glass picks up our keys and shuffles some paper followed by showing us the entry which he wrote earlier in the evening. Meticulously tippexed out and writen under the room number - Britanski. He shuffles our passports and eventually returns our room key.

The man in the tourist information responds slowly eventually showing us some towns we can get a bus to in the High Tatras. After ten minutes he returns with the time for Monday, we explain we want to leave now not in three days time so reluctantly he returns to his files. In the mean time a bright young Slovak girl notices what is happening and comes up to us to explain simply what we are looking for. She shows us instantly the biggest castle in Middle Europe and within 30 seconds tells us there is a bus in half an hours time and another an hour after that.

We take the bus. The young man in the immaculate tourist information greats us straight away and enthusiastically fires of information about Celtic tribes leaving coins, Mongol invasions being held back, fascinating monasteries by tall rock formations and where we can buy bread and cheese before climbing to the top of the tower from where we could see the start of the High Tatras reaching along the horizon.

This country is run by my generation and works incredibly - the things that matter such as buses, toilets, food, bars beyond western standards. To the older generation, which is used to shuffling mountains of Soviet Paperwork, all that was needed was to say good evening as we walked to our room.

However there are exceptions such as the man I met three nights ago who taught me to be afraid of ideologies.

Amongst Russians

Today Poland and the US signed the missile defense deal; Russia have stated that they will drop a nuclear bomb on it when it is built; Russia have invaded Georgia blocking off access to Central Asian resources and will not leave. Today the entire world has changed dramatically.

This is not the fault of Russia this is the fault of your average British family shored up in their living room conserving their wealth, with the credit crunch which was inevitable from the decades of consuming many more times that which we contribute.

Compare sitting in a bar in Christchurch-upon-Avon and standing at a bar in Tarnóv. In the former the children are smugly sat in exclusive groups milking their parents cash awaiting the return to a hothouse university with the only ambition to fuck anything that moves; in the later there is a real sense of meaning as people strive to break from decades of horizontal constraints expressed through a keen desire to share in our language our culture our visions of a Europe of universal tolerance.

There is a line you cross somewhere between Thungria and the Danzig corridor where there is a back wash of ideas separated by a generation. Take the revolution of the sixties where culture became vertical and entire nations were rebuilt to avoid repeated atrocities. That is happening again now in Poland and we must learn from them. We must not forget out past and how we came to be in the situation we are now in. We must not forget what happened when empires drew lines all over the world and grew fat in our extravagant towns in Köln in Newcastle in Marseilles before tearing everything apart. Listen to the voice of the nightingale in the bar in Tarnóv singing of the paradise of America, stroll the Carpathians to look over unbelievably lush country, enthusiastically hit back vodkas with the man with "soldier" tattooed on to his forehead then go and sit on your couch.

Orthogonal to old friends

From drinking with old friends in the familiar projection of the original setting, I headed for something new... only to find myself orthogonal to my own path: the road to Santiago running backwards, bearing centuries of pilgrims striving to trancend and open up the boundaries of their world; the fresh green lillies of La Meusse, with its tail hydrating the richest of wines and its head open to every continent sheilded by the dijks of Rotterdam. From Metz to Saarbruken the V-shaped vallies thicken with temperate rain forests before breaking into the vast flood plain of the artery of the mighty Rhine - harnessed to sprout crystal towers. The rich smell of fresh Thungrian pine, the petrification of hiding amongst tall dark fingers and the illumination of the canopy with fairy lights as the morning sun cuts through, were only another step of St. Jaques who wound up along the summer carpet to gaze along the ridge of the Wold and down upon the free state of Martin Luther and inspiration of Bach.