The Nomadic Alternative – Page 231

eight days in a gale in the Bay of Biscay, convinced we were sinking and obsessed with a fantasy of kippers, brown bread and milk. As reward for their fasting, Irish anchorites saw palisades of bacon and castles of custard. Hobos and railroading bums of North America visited the Land of Milk and Honey with its cigarette trees and "lemonade springs where the bluebird sings on the Big Rock Candy Mountain". That anguished epileptic Edward Lear, I feel sure, knew the taste of his Crumbobblious Cutlets or Plumbunnia Nutritosa.

Terrestrial Paradises reveal themselves to travellers only when they have passed through the Vale of Terror. New Jerusalem, El Dorado, Atlantis or Avalon lie penned in by high mountains where there is no oxygen in the air, or on the far side of a waterless desert, foodless jungle, billowing ocean or at the end of a fast.

The jewelled lands of perpetual warmth where the Hyperboreans or the Uttarakurus ran about naked lay in the far frozen north beyond the back of the North Wind. From my own limited experience again, I was caught one Christmas in a blizzard up an Irish mountain, and all but froze to death when the snow flakes turned lilac and orange and the snowdrifts soft and warm as feather pillows. The Ancient Greeks and Chinese called Siberia the Land of Feathers. The Sunny Pleasure Dome has Caves of Ice.

But if Heaven is a place of Light and Movement, Hell is Darkness and Torpor. The Devil is fat. He eyes victims and turns them into stone. A neurosis is a message from Hell, a mental flail to whip the overstuffed into activity and decongest their swollen livers.

They have thought to take insurance policies against the lean season. But each year they avert it, each roll of fat they add to an over-extended girth, diminishes their chance of dodging for safety when the Beast pounces from the dark wood. Pascal was right: "Inertia is death."