Greece, Patras.
Friday 8th December.
The truckers stand in line and wait for food on the ferry to Venice. A huge number of truckers use this ferry, I watched the dozens of trucks orchestrating their complicated loads of cars, cargo and crates. The waiters profile the truckers and when they pass their plates over, they come back brimming. These are hungry men with large bellies. Wiggy and I return to our table with slimmer pickings, it’s plenty for me but Wiggy with his super fast metabolism looks around and grumbles, I fork some of my curry and chips onto his plate.
Around us, other guests fill the food hall with the calm ambience of cutlery clinking and murmurous chatter. At midday, many guests have already opened bottles of red wine and share a glass as they serenely stare out at the Mediterranean Sea.
I like this boat, it has a relaxed vibe today; the sea is calm, the guests are minimal, and the vacant seats are plentiful. Later, we spend a lot of time in our windowless cabin. I’m currently backtracking through almost four months of travel footage to create video reels of our trip. I enjoy this but also sink into it obsessively without resting my eyes, until eventually, sleep takes me…
To a strange landscape, where our gardens were flooded. Wet grass folded into deep black puddles, in which I could not see their lowest depths. Because of the undulating structure of my garden, there was a raised section where I could stand and remain dry. Two other sections also remained dry and in each a large fish was trapped. Two huge and lengthy catfish; one looked soft and slippery, the other was black and stripped by a dart of white.
The fish scared me but the black water more so, I did not want to fall in. Regardless, somehow I managed to free the fish and place them in the flood waters. But instead of sinking into the depths, the fish rose into the air. I watched as the large catfish sailed up and glided through an allotment of thin-stemmed trees. So desperately I wanted to record the image but my phone had no battery.
Later, I met up with the other inhabitants of the street to discuss the floods. I could fly but it was a heavy shallow flight that only just transported me above the flooding. I noticed Keane Reeves and a lady I used to work with in London, her face looked artificially bright as if edited in Photoshop and her hair looked an impossible bleach blond. I wondered what their video reels would depict.
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