Life As a Kite

By Cliff James

The world feels increasingly volatile and polarised. Millions of people are displaced or alienated by abuses of power. Our lives are cluttered, stressful and unsatisfying. Our sense of who we are and where we belong is more fragile than ever.

Following political and personal upheaval at home, Cliff James emigrated from his native England and travelled the globe in search of an ideal society. In his quest for Utopia, he sought enlightenment in Himalayan temples, joined ecological and peace projects in Israel and Palestine, and served at refugee camps and organic farms from Europe to Asia, Australia and South America.

Against a backdrop of global instability, he depicts the intricacies of daily life around the world, the challenges of social and environmental injustice, and the resilience of the human spirit. Life As A Kite is a philosophical as much as a geographical journey, a personal narrative of loss and hope, and a manifesto for a future without frontiers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244834340

Book preview

Life As a Kite

LIFE AS A KITE

by Cliff James

With a Foreword by Ed Bixter

Para Alvaro, por supuesto

COPYRIGHT

Published in 2019 by LittleBirdZine and Cliff James

Life As A Kite Copyright © 2019 Cliff James

Foreword Copyright © 2018 Ed Bixter

First Edition

ISBN: 978-0-244-83434-0

The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All Rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.  

This is a work of creative non-fiction.  While the events described are done so according to the best of the author’s memory, it is acknowledged that human memory is a dynamic process that continually reinterprets the past in order to make sense of the present.  The conversations come from the author’s recollections and are not intended to represent verbatim transcripts; rather, the author has retold them in a way that accurately evokes the feeling and meaning of what was said.  In order to protect the anonymity of certain individuals, some names, identifying features and specific details of locations may have been changed.  The names of those in authority have not been altered, as it is the responsibility of the writer to speak truth to power.

Life As A Kite is published with the kind support of LittleBirdZine.

Cover Image: Library In The Desert, Palestine, 2016 by Cliff James

CONTENTS

Foreword – by Ed Bixter

Life As A Kite

1.  The Crossing

2.  First Humanity

3.  The Present

4.  Rock And No Water

5.  Rain In Neverland

6.  What Ithaca Means

7.  The Hermit

8.  The Mother

9.  Death And The Goddess

10.  Hell Beings And Hungry Ghosts

11.  The Path Is A Spiral

12.  Of Dogs And Kings

13.  Flower-Bird-Wind-Moon

14.  Shadows In The Cave

15.  Citizens Of The Cosmos

16.  South Wind, Borne Away

17.  An Imaginary Life

Epilogue – Fronteras

Acknowledgements

Biographical Notes

FOREWORD

The UK is in the grips of a heatwave and I have just arrived in London with a very important job to do.  From Euston, I take the tube to Southwark Station.  ‘This is fancy,’ I think as I ascend what feels like the innards of the Atomium.  ‘There must be rich people here’.  I am in London to meet Cliff James and my very important job is to distract him.

I have invented a new character for myself while I am here.  My shoulder-length hair has been cut and I am wearing smart trousers and a shirt, both of which I had to buy specially.  I am dressed as a ‘normal’ person.  I make the short walk down Union Street and sit outside a café next door to the hotel where I will be staying.  As I sit back, a steaming coffee in front of me, sun blazing down, I am almost immediately asked for directions to Southwark Tube Station, which I am able to give with the relaxed confidence of a local.  The ‘normal person’ disguise is working.  I see Cliff approaching from halfway down the road.  He has the look of a modern-day explorer who has drifted into town, haloed by an aura of adventure.  London looks too orderly as it towers around him.

My room in the hotel is level with the trains running over the Low Line between London Bridge and Waterloo stations.  From Cliff’s room, it is possible to make out the blue plaque on the site of Mary Wollstonecraft’s former home in Dolben Street.  He decides that this bodes well.  Cliff also has a job to do, a duty that hangs heavy in the air.

In 2015, Cliff was waiting to be called as a witness in the criminal trial of the former Bishop of Lewes and Gloucester, Peter Ball.  At the opening of the trial, Peter Ball pleaded guilty to counts of misconduct in a public office and indecent assault against young men between 1977 and 1992.   Cliff had been one of those young men.

Cliff is now in London to give evidence about Peter Ball to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).  The Inquiry will be hearing from police, lords, clergy and even the Prince of Wales.  News stories relating to the Inquiry – mostly reports of leaked confidential information – have been buzzing around all week.  Cliff is understandably apprehensive about appearing and reopening old wounds.  I immediately set about distracting him by suggesting we go for a drink.  We walk to the South Bank and sit in the secluded beer garden of a bar, which, despite its prime location, is reassuringly shabby and almost completely deserted.

‘You’ve had your hair cut,’ Cliff observes.

‘I decided I needed to look less like a complete mess and a bit more like a human.  I don’t want to alarm the normal people.’

‘I should have thought of that; I didn’t bring anything smart to wear,’ Cliff says with a smirk, his eyes half closed as he finishes his roll-up cigarette.  I bombard him with disparate topics of conversation.  Inevitably, though, we end up talking about the Inquiry and decide to locate the building we will be heading to in the morning.  We agree to meet outside the hotel at 8:25, unless we happen to run into each other at breakfast.

I make sure I am down early for breakfast.  When Cliff emerges I can sense his anxiety, so refrain from making small talk and leave him to have breakfast on his own.  Outside, the sun has returned and the temperature is on the rise.  We stroll to the Inquiry – Normal Guy and Explorer – trying not to break a sweat.

We pass through a security scanner and are met by a man who is every bit a Cockney gangster.  He is ill-matched to his suit – another ‘normal guy’ costume.  Uniform, suit, cassock, crown: the artifice of respectability conceals many truths.  In a way, that is the problem at the core of this inquiry.  ‘I’ll be looking after you,’ he growls, ‘I can get you anything.’  ‘I bet you can,’ I think, even though at the time he is talking about our options for lunch.  He takes us to a private room where Cliff is presented with a huge ring-binder containing the evidence relating to his part of the case.  The Counsel to the Inquiry gives him an idea of what he will be asked.  He will mostly be confirming his documented statements. 

‘And, presumably, if he doesn’t mention something important, you will prompt him?’ I ask.

‘Yes, I can always go back and…’ Her voice fades away and I hear only the voice in my head saying, ‘That was a great Normal Guy question.  I bet they’re all impressed at what a ‘normal’ person Cliff has brought with him.’

After hours of delays and waiting, Cliff is finally called to give his evidence.  I stay behind.  Thirty minutes pass.  At some point I leave the room to use the toilet.  In the corridor there is a woman I have not seen before.  She is sitting on a chair with a laptop on her knees.  As soon as I come out of the room, she snaps the laptop closed and jumps to her feet. 

‘Can I help you?’ she says, more a statement than a question, and said with an authority that makes Normal Guy feel suddenly naked.  This one doesn’t care what I look like: she just sees a potential threat. 

‘I’m going to the toilet,’ I say. Her manner eases and she lets me pass. ‘Well, you clearly work for MI5,’ I think, disgruntled that Normal Guy had survived eight hours behind the scenes at the Inquiry, only to have the whole character dismantled a mere twenty minutes before leaving.

At five o’clock you can smell the tarmac melting on London Bridge.  We move from shadow to shadow, avoiding being burned.  This must be what ants feel like as a child manoeuvres a magnifying glass over them.  We walk, simply to make up for a day of sitting around, and finally head to the pub across the road from our hotel.  The Lord Nelson is a colourful place with satisfyingly irreverent decor for somewhere with such a sober name.  This was once a traditional pub and, at its core, it retains that general aesthetic, albeit under layers of Star Wars posters and images of Noel Edmunds.  On one wall there is a sign stating that the Lord Nelson makes ‘the best burgers in London’.  Why not the UK?  Why not the world?  We decide not to risk it, and both order fish and chips.

During his travels, Cliff and I had kept in contact through email.  Sometimes he would be silent for weeks, while he was camping with cats and chickens in Japan or lodging in temples in India.  Occasionally he would send me freshly-completed chapters of Life As A Kite.  From my small flat in Liverpool, I was hooked on these updates of his aleatory wanderings.  I soon became his nagging voice, always demanding he keep writing, that he finish this book.  Now, sitting in the beer garden of the Lord Nelson, the heat of the day lingering in the night air, Cliff asks if I will write a foreword to his newly-completed book.  What else could I say but, ‘Of course’?

* * *

In the lead-up to the 2016 Referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, the public mood had become volatile.  The announcement of the Referendum had put EU membership at the forefront of British politics and, before long, society had collapsed in fervent division: ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’.  Even those without strong views either way could do little to avoid the fury and contempt emitting from the chaotic discourse around the whole thing.  There were people who, at the time, boldly stated that, if the country voted to leave, they would leave the country.  There were others who decided to use the mood of the debate to act out their vile impulses in the form of verbal and physical abuse and, despite the pointedly tasteless claims of Leave-figurehead Nigel Farage – that the Leave vote was won ‘without a single bullet being fired’ – pro-Remain Labour MP Jo Cox was gunned down by a man shouting ‘Britain first’, just a week before the vote.

There was a quiet optimism, perhaps even a complacency, that these furious, inward-looking voices were a minority and that, after all the months of insults and vitriol, Remain would win.  When the result of the Referendum was in, the feeling, for many, was one of shock: the angry Leavers were, somehow, the majority.  What was this country we had woken up in and where was the place we had been living in until we had gone to bed the night before?  This is the political backdrop and societal mood at the start of Life As A Kite.

Cliff James was one of those who said that if Leave won he would leave and, indeed, he acted on it immediately.  For those with a close eye on politics, the strong anti-EU sentiment did not come entirely as a bolt from the blue; the feeling had been infusing for some time.  In 2014, Cliff, whose grandparents were from Limerick, applied for Irish Citizenship.  His Irish passport was his ‘get-out-of-jail-free card’ in the event that the UK did not pass Go and did not collect £200.

This political context may be the impetus of Cliff’s journey but it is far from what Life As A Kite is really about.  There is more to his leaving the UK than toxic politics and a lot more he is seeking than a few weeks away in the sun.

It is where Cliff chooses to go, the people he seeks out and the means by which he is able to undertake this whole endeavour that make this book a story that reaches far beyond the transient confines of a political moment.

This is a quest for humanity, for a community with humanity at its core, and a need to untangle a disturbing and painful past.  We cannot know someone else’s pain, nor how best to deal with it; that is a journey for them.

Ed Bixter

Liverpool, 2018

Life As A Kite

You have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm.  Once you were apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ -

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

- Antonio Gramsci -

CHAPTER ONE - The Crossing

Dover, England, 15th – 16th October 2016

Halifax, Huddersfield, Dewsbury, Meadowhall.  The motorway is October grey, broken-hearted down the cold hard-shoulder from Pennine and Calder to Estuary and Down.  There is mist but no fruitfulness, a season of shrugs and heady emptiness.  Golden brown is the name of the ash and the fleeting elm we meet briefly and leave behind.  They know too that their days are numbered.

They are playing football in the school fields today, the boys in their teams in their them-and-us colours.  Parents on the side-lines with their them-and-us faces, mouthing fury and encouragement in unequal measure – for this is a war and they need to learn early.  Paper cups crack in impotent fists.  Besides, it is raining.

An hour or so beyond Sheffield, the landscape gets even, takes on a southerly flatness.  In Lincolnshire, the sun makes a tepid appearance.  Unimpressed, it does not stay for long.

Here are light showers with sunny spells, a BBC Weather montage of autumn leaves, for this is the autumn and in this place we do autumn things.  We are ripening, on the turn.  We start new schools and colleges and classes.  We gather and store, we pluck and prune; seed-heads erupt, take flight and scatter.  We have residual, ancestral memories of the harvest, of common offerings and fire festivals, and one last great journey to another hunting ground before the snow covers the old trackways and we camp where we are for the winter.  We summon the dead, burn the guys, bombard the sky with daring flares before the long, deep sleep of the dark night begins.  We leave our lovers, our homes, our countries.  I leave.

* * *

The coach station at London Victoria is soulless, pitiless, has seen too much of too many faces to give any grace or favours to transitory strangers.  No one comes here to stand more than one night and that must surely sting.  Rejected, it rejects.  This is not a place to fall in love.  Nor is this a time.

What we do well, the British, they say, is wait in queues. I do not know if I am still British.  I no longer recognise the country in which, by nothing more than chance, I happened to be born.  The language has shifted, the diction is now sharper than broken glass, the lexicon reduced to a brick and a window.  But I do know that I can wait.  Waiting is not the test of Britishness.  The true test of that is now something entirely different, something less polite and reasonable, more irrational, shrill and violent.  Nonetheless, I have waited patiently in a queue of days, weeks and months, waited amid growing shrillness and violence to get to this day.

Now wait here, in this plastic seat, in this littered cafe in Victoria Coach Station with a dozen or so other travellers, each one coming from some particular house and town where they are known and loved, each going to some other half-dreamed destination on this inherently unbordered planet, now paused and anxious in a midway point of mutual uncertainty, avoiding eye-contact, calculating risks, a solitary hot chocolate for company.  Wait here in a queue of minutes for the coach of Exodus and consider the solidity of what you have abandoned, the fragility of the idea to which you are heading.  Consider, traveller, what, if anything, you are.

On the road you are where you are, no place else until the next place – a citizen of the moment, fluid as fuck, but still indisputably on and of the Earth.

The Prime Minister Theresa May says she knows what you are better than you do.  She says that a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere – although most scientists and philosophers would argue, on the contrary, that the world is quite definitely somewhere.  The fragile contours of our small blue planet are quite easily identifiable to any passing asteroid.

Theresa May’s vision – anti-vision – is that of the apeman who, obsessed with the cave in which he eats, sleeps and shits, jealously guards it against the shadows he cannot understand, unable to conceive of a wider world beyond his own obsessions, held back by lack of knowledge and an experientially stunted imagination.

Theresa May’s them-and-us nationalism has been done before.  We have seen where that leads: it does not end well.  Nationality is as vaporous and as insubstantial as a collective dream, no more spiritual than a National Insurance number and no less randomly bestowed: determined by chance, conditioned by prejudice.  We have moved beyond the apeman’s horizon.  We have.  Surely we have.

By six o’clock, our road is a sleek, black river of rain and streetlamp-amber cast wide and scattered on speeding tarmac.  Lewisham, Gillingham, Canterbury, Dover: the whole of Kent is sinking in dampness, darkness, sinking.  When we arrive at our port, it seems that all the streetlights of the town centre have been put out by the rain.  It is only nine o’clock but the unlit stage has been deserted by all but a handful of kids drinking from glass bottles in bus shelters, hissing at each other, cocky hackles raised in premature aggression.  This is no time to be wandering a strange, unlighted town with a seventy-litre rucksack on your back with neither map nor sense of which way to take.

I take several wrong turns, find darker streets, call taxi numbers that refuse to answer, attract whistles and calls from the bus-shelter tomcats, am watched closely by two guys on mobile phones who cross the road and follow my movements with intentional interest, and finally – in the florescent light and CCTV sanctuary of a bank, of all places – get through to a taxi firm.  The lions, the tigers and bears retreat when the taxi arrives.  A few minutes later, an austerity-themed bed-and-breakfast, disheartening at any other time, is my Rivendell tonight.  I practically kiss the landlady on arrival.

* * *

Red sky in the morning, the sailors have all been warned.  Walk the harbour front to the Meccano Port of Dover and head towards the white cliffs on the other side, which you want to see, which you really ought to visit one last time before entering exile, before this island sinks altogether beneath the quick-flowing waves of apocalyptic fury like some prosaic, stiff-lipped Atlantis.

Although you have passed no no-entry signs or gates or fences along your way, you will be halted by uniformed port officials in an unmarked van who have been alerted by vigilant cameras of your unwarranted presence, for no backpacker may loiter near such a national target.  They think you are lost, they think you should turn back, and no, no, they don’t know how to get to the white cliffs (which really are just over there, look), but you have to go back the way you came, now, sir, for security reasons, sir, so that the ageing Daily Mail-reading couples may sleep safely, if chastely, in their twin beds, net curtains drawn against the unknown unknowns, nightmares nursed in secure containment as the fuming waters rise.

Here, leaving the departure lounge, leaving the port, the shore and those cliffs that the Romans named, it hits you with the existential force of a near-gale off the Kentish coast: that first-day-of-school terror, standing alone on the lonely edge of a lifelong precipice where no one will ever look out for you again, for this is the first day of exile.  Nationless, jobless and abruptly single after ten uneven years, it is breath-stealing, suffocating, heart-breaking at once.  Breathe.  Steel yourself, for here ends gravity and there are now no anchors to keep you grounded.  Beware, the apeman is not prepared for such leaps of imagination.  Life is a kite.  Remember to breathe.

Crossing the English Channel in the suitably named Pride Of Kent, an unanticipated, unopposed, irrefutable message for me flashes across the public sky of social-media for all the world to see: ‘You are selfish, irresponsible, and a fucking nasty piece of work.’  He has to do this, I know.  This is his grief and it must be spoken, will brook no consideration.  I acknowledge the justice of his sentiment, absorb the painful aptness of his timing.  Emotional euthanasia is sometimes necessary, rarely forgiven.

With the next gust of gale, my ex-mother-in-law heaves her avenging maternal presence across the footnotes of his public comments like an asthmatic Valkyrie, and adds, ‘You forgot to mention he’s also a fucking cunt.  You’d better look out for karma on your travels.’  There are only so many albatrosses I can wear around my neck at this time.  And, besides, her pronouns are all over the shop, so I delete her words.

We are halfway across the English Channel.  Folklore says that magic cannot pass moving water, but the waves are rising, storm clouds scour the horizon, and the Valkyrie’s curse follows the ship in a chorus of seagulls.

CHAPTER TWO – First Humanity

Calais, France, 16th – 26th October 2016

Calais is a city of winds.  For six days, La Manche has been brewing almighty arias out at sea, throwing her voice against the shoreline, the clattering masts of marina yachts, the lights of the harbour town.  At night, our bedroom doors in the Centre Europeen de Sejour a Calais rattle in the wind.  It is an endlessly restless ethereal guest that will neither stay nor leave.  We have fitful sleep and thin eyes in the morning.

Seven o’clock breakfast on the first day, a carb-extravaganza of baguette and cake.  My hostel roommate suggests that, instead of catching the bus, I should approach another table in the canteen to ask if anyone is driving to the warehouse where I will be stationed.  My roommate is volunteering with another refugee crisis charity, Care4Calais, and cycles there each day.  Ask someone for a lift, he says as though it was the easiest thing in the world.  It is not something I am at all comfortable with.

There is no guarantee that the boarders at the other tables are either English-speakers or volunteers with the refugee centres, nor that they are sympathetic to those who have fled war and persecution in their home country.  Openly supporting refugees today is like coming out as gay in the 1980s – kindness is in short supply.  Besides, there is the awkwardness of asking strangers for a favour, the greatest of all English faux pas.  I am reverting to schoolhood terrors of rejection and ridicule, decide to wait.  Here is a fantasy in which a life-coordinator enters my reality, walks into the canteen with a clipboard and pen, asks if any volunteers need a lift.  Better still, specifically calls out my name.

I wait for this fantasy to come true.  I wait until it is now half-past eight, too late to catch the bus.  My roommate watches to see what I will do, whether I have the courage for this simplest of social trials.  Breathe deeply and dive in.  Ridicule is nothing to be scared of, Prince Charming.  Breathe, fake bravado.

A neighbouring table of eight or so people pauses mid-laugh as I interrupt their conversation; faces blank suspiciously.  I say that this is my first day volunteering with a refugee charity, L’Auberge Des Migrants and – but there is no need to say more.  They all speak at once: one has been volunteering at that very centre for weeks, most for a few days, two others are on their first day.  They have several cars between them, and spare seats.  I am offered a number of lifts.  All the volunteers are from England.

With a few words, the social walls and suspicions that divided us moments ago are gone – not because of anything as arbitrary and trivial as a shared country of birth, but because of a mutual desire for an improved, more humane, more decent world.  We are bound by what we have chosen to be, by the values we have chosen to live by and the future we want to build, rather than what has been randomly imposed on us: ethnic group, skin colour, nationality.  From this moment and for the rest of my time in Calais, I belong to a community that is open-hearted, compassionate and highly inventive. By the end of the week, I am approaching random English-speakers at bus shelters, on buses, outside the hostel, asking if they are also volunteering at one of the refugee charities.  Without exception, they are.

The warehouse, when we arrive at nine, is already a hive of various industries.  The vastly complex operation is run and managed entirely by volunteers, some of whom have been living in the ramshackle on-site camp – CaravaNarnia – since this new warehouse opened a year ago.  It is a functioning, thriving post-apocalyptic utopia.

In the wood-yard, a team of young women are operating the industrial saws to prepare firewood for the residents of the ‘Calais Jungle’.  A forklift truck is unloading a fresh delivery of donated clothing and blankets from a packed container lorry.  The kitchen team is already chopping vegetables for the 2,000 hot meals that go out to the refugee camp every day.  A line of luggage trolleys are delivering countless sacks of rice and chickpeas to the food store.  Men on the roof of the warehouse are shouting for more tools to repair the leaking ceiling.  Everywhere there is movement and industry.

As one of the forty or so new volunteers who have arrived that day, you are summoned to the morning briefing.  The volunteer coordinator, a young woman who has given this same briefing a hundred times before, is as buoyant and self-assured as a holiday-club rep.  The housekeeping basics are straightforward: toilets, two breaks, the work finishes at six, no smoking inside (the mountain of bedding is highly flammable).  And, talking of fire, no photographs of the outside of the warehouse; if these are posted online it will remind the local anti-refugee militias of our location and there is a real risk of arson, of right-wing attacks against volunteers.  I have already met two volunteers whose cars have been keyed and their window smashed.

Most importantly, the coordinator continues, no new volunteers are allowed into the Jungle – it is not a zoo for the entertainment of sightseers; it is a matter of dignity and respect.  Those who do go into the camp are thoroughly trained and briefed, whereas any wrong information or careless rumour from an untrained do-gooder will spread like wildfire (fire again) and the residents may make life-or-death decisions based on bad facts.  No photographs of the refugees, particularly of the children.  At the last eviction, 129 unaccompanied minors went missing, most probably abducted.  A photograph of one unaccompanied child posted online will advertise the presence of vulnerable children to anyone who has an interest in taking them.

Take pride in the essential work you do, she says.  Without the warehouse work, the residents of the camp would receive none of the supplies they need.  She jokes, she cajoles, she plays authoritative when she has to and, by the end of the briefing, we are fired up for any amount of manual labour that needs to be done.

My first job is to refill two dozen empty fire extinguishers.  Last night, there were more fires in the camp; tents, huts and shelters were all burned.  They say these could have been ignited by the gas-canisters fired by the police that, I am to discover, is a nightly occurrence as the eviction day approaches.  Next, I am allocated to ‘Bedding’ to help sort the four-metre-high mountain range of blankets, duvets, sleeping bags, pillows and sheets that have been donated by the remaining good people of England and France.  Today, we are to check, sniff and approve or reject only the blankets.  To add to the adventure, there are no blankets to be found on the top terraces of the mountain.  Rumour has it there is a rich seam of blanketry somewhere near the deeper levels.  This place is, I know, a fertile breeding ground for scabies and body lice.  Nonetheless, we physically dive in and mine.

Lunch is the highlight of the day.  The queues for food are long – there must be more than two hundred volunteers at the warehouse today – but each plate is piled high and the vegetarian curry surpasses any I have paid good money for in Bradford.  We drink fresh coffee from jam-jar mugs and engage in first-year-fresher conversations with strangers: Where are you from? How long have you been here?  What are you doing?  I make friends with a Spanish comrade who tells me that that he never expected to find so many British people among the volunteers.  In Spain, he says, all we hear about England is Brexit and Nigel Farage and all this talk of no-more-migrants.  But here, almost everybody is from the UK.

‘When I go home,’ he continues, ‘I will tell my friends what I have seen of the English.  It will change their bad opinion of your country.’

And he is right.  The vast majority of volunteers, more than eighty per cent I would guess, have come from across the Channel.  I talk to many people and find they are from all over the UK, England in particular: Southampton, Swindon, Portsmouth, Brighton, Torquay, Bristol, London, Northampton, Norfolk, Manchester, Oldham, Birmingham, the Lake District.  I lose count of the towns and counties.  And all ages too, from many eighteen-year-olds to a retired couple in their seventies; one female vicar could even be an octogenarian.  Paradoxically, it is only once I have abandoned England because of the rising hate and intolerance that I discover the compassion of the English.

These lunch-breaks are used to explore the volunteer camp around the warehouse.  On a notice board hanging from the main door is a census of the Jungle.  In August, there were 9,106 residents (of which 676 were unaccompanied minors).  By September, this has risen to 10,188 residents (1,022 unaccompanied minors).  In a hut near CaravaNarnia, two kittens have been invited to take up residence, I am told, to reduce the number of rats.  There are amusing, inspiring and clichéd scribblings on various walls.  My favourite by far, penned on the side of the food collection van, reads: ‘First Humanity, then do your job’.

The open-air wash station beside a row of portable toilets has various notices for the volunteers – yoga, acupuncture and meditation sessions – but the key message is to remind people to take a break from work:

‘Taking time off is important!  Try to take two days off a week.  If you have worked for ten days, you must take at least one day off.  If you have worked for three months, you must take at least a week off.’

And this is one thing that stands out about all of the volunteers I meet: everyone gives more in unpaid time, care and effort at this place, to improve the conditions of those less fortunate than themselves, than anyone would give in an ordinary paid job at home.

Over time, I begin to see how a post-money society would work in practice.  When we are in paid employment, we are exchanging our labour in return for money in order to live within a money-based society, nothing more.  Both sides in the labour-salary exchange are motivated by self-interest.  But when we volunteer our labour for a cause, for a better world, we are not so much exchanging our labour as investing it directly into the world we want to see.  Notes for Utopia: there will be no money when we get there.  Our days are long, but the atmosphere is empowering.

On my second day, I find I am