The taste of sweet Chinese icing (2006)

The taste of sweet Chinese icing has almost left my memory, and my small, long haired ginger cat rests his head against my studio’s marble floor - always eager to indulge in a modicum of air-con.

Yesterday’s celebrations are not quite so embarrassing to me now, and I am forced to acknowledge that I am another year older.

 

Birthdays are the epitome of infamy when it comes to reminiscence, and birthdays reaching beyond the half century mark even more so. Jung might have called it the process of individuation, of integrating all that we are and all we have been into the individual’s psyche or self.

Is this a maudlin process? No, I don’t believe it to be so, but, perhaps, a meditative self reflection!

“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age” Victor Hugo said.

Yesterday I dubiously achieved fifty-five years on this planet.

This morning I find myself musing upon my ramblings, voyages and sojourns - enquiring of myself, in an almost Cartesian way just how I got be here, living my present life in Perak, Malaysia and finding a curious kind of contentment.

 

In films the air would shimmer, there would be a dissolve and a sepia coloured past would present itself, slowly changing to colour to heighten the sense of reality.

Please take that as read.

And …..action….

 

There were three who became six who became one – I was that one. Jules, J.C. and I were the three, later to be joined by Jude, Roger and Alison completing the six. It was the British summer of 1968, I had read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and listened to Canned Heat’s On the Road Again, so when Jude suggested we all bundle into the back of his aging Land Rover and decamp to Halifax, I was game. So game and foolhardy in fact that I left my employment as an apprentice antiquarian bookbinder, and took a leap into the unknown.

Like a lot of people at seventeen I was still a child. I was playing at being a bohemian, a beatnik; only after the Haight-Ashbury ‘Summer of Love’, “Happenings” and “Be-Ins” phenomena the press re-designated Beatniks as Hippies - etymologically the term Hippy derived from the old Beat term Hipster.

Jules adopted the obligatory black plastic Beat rain coat, while I initially sported a (Bob) Dylan denim hat. My contemporaries and I read the Beat poetry and novels of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and the 1950s Beat Generation. We listened to Allen Ginsberg croak Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out with The Fugs, and were shockingly thrilled by Frank Zappa’s irreverent Mother’s of Invention. Jules had run away to London at sixteen and came back with a ‘knowing’ aura around him. Jude grew a straggly beard and said ‘man’ a lot and J.C. would quote from Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground songs; all of which, as a naïve seventeen year old, I found terribly impressive.

 

Halifax was a disaster – a group of kids ranging from sixteen to twenty pretending to be a real commune. Yes we had heard the term ‘commune’ but were too naïve and too irresponsible to be able to bring this concept into the reality of communal living. What little money we had was spent on drugs and alcohol, oh and a little food too.

 

In Triangle, the local village, we quickly gained the reputation of ‘satanic devil worshippers’, due mostly to the weird garb we donned and the bizarre music we listened to. We were shunned by all but the youngest kids who, for some reason, found us fascinating, as did the co-op manageress, for reasons of her own.

 

The ‘commune’ lasted about a month. As the money ran out so did various personnel. At one point we were about fifteen, a mere handful were left when we were finally raided by the police. Having found no drugs, nor food, the police invited us to leave the area, hopefully never to return. In a true revolutionary spirit, meekly we complied.

 

It was, however, during this time that I got to know Roger and Alice at the commune. Roger was somewhat of a peer leader, having a banker father he was able to buy import American albums, and books, and was the source of much delectable music from Pink Floyd to Velvet Underground, Quicksilver Messenger Service and The Incredible String Band.

 

Alison was sixteen, a child in mind and body who constructed fantasies of her gypsy heritage, and liked to read Tarot cards. Alison’s other main attribute was her ability to get on with people, and it was later through her that I was introduced to journalists and artists at the underground newspapers International Times (IT) and Black Dwarf, in London.

 

The Hippy generation has been referred to variously as being the Flower Power Love Generation, a generation of drop-outs and the Lost Generation; I prefer to think of us as a generation of seekers. Whether it was a journey through Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, aided by mescaline, LSD or other narcotics, or a more transcendental voyage into self discovery through exotic religious practices, it seems to me that all the people I met were questing, looking for something that was just out of their grasp. Conventional Western religions held little interest, though one friend and, to some extent, fellow traveller – Malcolm did attend theological college to study to become a Christian vicar.

Various shades of transcendental Hinduism had been introduced to drug soaked minds by peer leaders such as The Beatles and Donovan Leitch, who had spent time with a Maharishi in Rishikesh, India. Buddhism and Hinduism were promoted by arch Beat Allen Ginsberg who, on one album along with the Fugs, had chanted the Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna mantra after his sojourn in India - later this chant was to be taken up by George Harrison, lead guitarist of the Beatles, who helped sponsor the Hare Krishna movement in London.

 

In those heady, halcyon days friends disappeared and re-appeared from exotic climes such as India, Turkey and Tibet.

 

Long Distance bus journeys were made from the tip of North America to Mexico. Magic buses trekked to Marrakech, while Land Rovers crammed with innocent and starry-eyed travellers took trans-continental treks to discover Nirvana and hashish.

 

Hometown boys and girls donned back-packs and hitch-hiked their way in and out of trouble - budding Thomas Cooks wistfully emulating The Grand Tour of a previous century. Greece was newly discovered, as were the Balearics and India’s Goa. 

 

People attempting to find themselves in other styles of life tried genuine communal living, even to the extent of emulating North American Indians, living in Teepees, and calling themselves ‘tribes’. We had become the Tribe of the Consecrated Chrysanthemum, mocking those who were serious about their experimentation.

 

One serious Hippy group followed Digger Sid, initially encamping in a Welsh mining village but later moved onto a desolate island, off the Irish coast, owned by a prominent rock star. Another band of seekers herded themselves into Irish (Gypsy) caravans and led a nomadic lifestyle.

There was a yearning, a need to be other than one’s self, to be something more, to be different. Of course, to some extent, peer leaders had prospered this. During the late 1960s and early 1970s young working-class men, and it was mostly young men, had picked up their guitars and marched into fame and fortune, none more so than the Beatles.

 

Yet even with their great lifestyle change, from Art school to international recognition, the Beatles appeared to continue their individual inward journeys as John Lennon sang “…turn off your mind, relax and float down stream, it is not dying” while George Harrison entreats “try to realise its all within yourself, no one else can make you change, and to see you’re really only very small and life goes on within you and without you”. Perhaps their newly earned wealth enabled The Beatles to fulfil the sort of dreams and fantasies that us lesser folk dreamed and fantasised about, but didn’t have the cash to do anything about. 

 

I too had indulged in the drug frenzy and frantic search for identity, but after Halifax realised that larger communal living was not for me. For a while I shared a flat with Jules, J.C. and Roger, then later just with Roger. I was not cut out for the disruption of living with other males, their mates and their parties. I was not one to be tempted by exotic religions either, so saffron robes and a shaven head did not entice me, nor did giving myself and all my worldly goods to an eastern guru.

I was neither an atheist, nor even agnostic and was not leftist enough to be Marxist nor rightist enough to be fascist, but someone who believed in their own way without the trappings of organised religion or political stance.

 

Many years later the survivors of the late 1960s/early 1970s grew through the self destructive yearnings of youth. Alison was diagnosed as having manic depression, and will no doubt take medication for the rest of her life. Roger runs an organisation in Wales helping people recover from drug and alcohol abuse. J.C. became a computer wiz kid, Jude got married and disappeared while Jules travelled the world and eventually became Dr Jules.

 

Of the others that I know about – Andy joined a religious sect and is living somewhere in Spain, Dave became psychotic through over usage of LSD and was hospitalised on more than one occasion. Helen became involved in a British terrorist movement and spent ten years locked away in a British prison.

Over one decade later; having left art school and traversed British university academia, I had shorn my rebelliously symbolic shoulder length hair, and, sporting a freshly grown beard, few into Penang (Pearl of the orient) airport, for the first time.

 

The eighteen hour flight had been uneventful despite it being my first international flight, and, from the moment I disembarked the trip seemed like a homecoming. I cannot fathom why I had this familiarity, or why everything which was so foreign seemed to tug at my memory cords. Was it Déjà vu? That feeling of having done something, or been somewhere before, or Jack London’s call of the wild – possibly, but whatever the psychological explanation the sense of belonging, at that time, was incredibly strong.

 

Albert Camus once described this subconscious recognition as “The world is never quiet. Even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody." Baudelaire too commented “Nature is a temple, where the living columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; man walks within these groves of symbols, each of which regards him as a kindred thing.”

 

Sungei Petani (SP), then a smallish town famed for padi fields and a rather spectacular pasar malam, housed me for my first six weeks in Malaysia, while I got to know the ancient royal state of Kedah and the neighbouring island of Pulau Penang.

 

Like any contemporaneous Puteh tourist I sampled the local taxis and buses, thrilled at the Butterworth to George Town ferry, and generally soaked up the fragrant and exotic Malaysian atmosphere.

You have to try to understand, I hail from the oldest recorded town in Britain – Colchester (roughly 43 AD) replete with Anglo Saxon this, Roman that and Norman the other. There may be an astounding surplus of history but there is not a single banana tree, apples but no durian.

 

In Malaysia I felt buffeted by eerie familiarity on the one appendage and exotic strangeness on the other. I felt completely unable to dismiss the ‘homecoming’ feeling, while soaking up the alien-ness surrounding me at every turn.

 

Over time I became acquainted with Malaysia from bustling Kuala Lumpur to bristling Johore, Taman Negera to Malacca, Kedah, Perak and localities too divers to mention. Increasingly I drifted into a scintillating love affair with Malaysian cuisine, the iniquitous blacan, delectable rojak and luscious laksa. Roti canai became my downfall, and dosa my deliverance. I dived into the pungent durian, sampled the stunning starfruit and ruffled the hairy rambutans.

 

Over a twenty five year period I frequently voyaged to Malaysia, secretly harbouring a yearning to settle. At times it seemed preposterous, unthinkable, unimaginable, and at other times the longing to do so became overwhelming. I tried to satiate my lust with frequent trips to Malaysia, but it was never enough, and departing brought not the sweetest, but the bitterest sorrow.

 

In time my questing urged me to follow in the footsteps of my father and forsake England to settle in Chennai, India. The yearning and longing for Malaysia only intensified, as slowly the realisation that I could no longer live in a single ethnic country grabbed hold of, and began to throttle my soul.

After the briefest of spells back in Britain I took the water buffalo by the horns and decided I must settle in Malaysia, once and for all time, for only residency in the land of Datu Mat Salleh and Tun Abdul Razak would satisfy this chronic urge and satiate my irrepressible lust.

 

Packing my faithful Sony Vaio and Minolta Dimage A1, some cotton clothes and sandals I boarded MAS MH 0003 from Heathrow, and, with excitement not to mention a little trepidation, journeyed the twelve leg numbing hours to arrive at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, and home.

 

By an almost other worldly co-incidence my friend of forty years standing - Jules, never knew his father, for he had served in the Federation of Malaya Police and was killed in action in Chenderiang, Perak, Malaya the year Jules and I were born, 1951. Jules’s father is buried at Batu Gaja cemetery just a few kilometres away from where I stay outside Kampar.

 

Jules unfortunately never met his father, but has lived and taught in Malaysia, and has, no doubt, tasted the sweet taste of Chinese icing.

 

For once you have tasted Chinese icing you will walk the earth with your eyes turned Eastwards, for there you have been and there you will long to return. With apologies to Leonardo Da Vinci

And that’s a wrap.