I have been to my mountain and discovered that people are still good!

It is past midnight in the small East Sierra town of Bishop, California, and I'm standing in the middle of a side road, grabbing lung-fulls of mountain air, taking in the fact that I have made it victoriously through my long list of destinations.
So far, the trip could not have gone better.
Upon my arrival, it was splendid to sit on my mate Andrew's deck, looking from the Berkeley hills out over the entirety of San Francisco Bay.
The next day he drove me over the Bay Bridge into the city, where I enjoyed a perfect morning researching for one of my novel's characters.
Andrew offered to cut off work early to drive me home, and I didn't fight him. Even though I had a difficult time living in Northern California, I was aware that it was a magnificent place.
While my day in North Beach was successful, returning to a place wherein so much love energy and emotion had been invested and spent was never going to be easy.
So it was good to head back to the East Bay, and admire one of the world's most beautiful cities from over the water.
Each night the combination of jetlag and emotional nonsense conspired to allow sleep only until 4am, whereupon my head would greet wakefulness as a herd of a thousand bison at full charge.
Early my second morning I rented a small tank, and headed inland, toward the Sierra Nevada.
With many mountain passes closed, I drove over the top of the range at Lake Tahoe, spending my first night just over the Nevada border. The drive had been long, and it had been tough driving up over and down mountains without a gear stick.
Over four days I drove 1300 miles, traversing 6 ranges over 7,000 feet, and never did the tank once feel good taking a corner.
The road to my mountain was tight, and as my tyres kicked rubble over the edge of a 6,000 foot sheer drop, I started shouting like a mad bastard, cursing my fictional character, telling him he bloody owed me for getting dumped out here in the middle of bloody nowhere.
And then I was there.
I stood on a desert plain that stretched for maybe 40 miles in a circular pan, rimmed by snowy breathtaking mountains, .
But while the view was stunning, the reason that I had to be there hit me like a sledgehammer on the head. Even though I had fairly well envisioned what it might be like for my character to be dumped there, I could never have imagined the power of that silence.
All this vast landscape, and not a single sound.
I have heard deafening silence and the silence of the absence of human sound, but there, surrounded by so much planet, this silence was vast.
I whispered as if in a cathedral
Fuuuu ..... kinnngggggg ............. heeeelllll!
The pinging of my tank's cooling engine sounded like artillery fire.
Exhausted and elated, I headed back to my motel room, to flop and enjoy the completion of my pilgrimage.
I had dealt with the details of my female character and her life in North Beach; dealt with my feelings and personal shite; driven to my mountain and done the deed, good and proper; but I had not reckoned for the good people of Bishop.
Unlike many small American towns, which consist of shops, restaurants and businesses spread out over two or three miles, Bishop has a real main street that you can walk along. The mountains parade their snowy loads behind the buildings, and there is a feeling of vitality and acceptance in the air.
Within an hour of arriving at Bishop, I popped into Spellbinder Books to buy a present. The lass behind the counter smiled and asked me what had brought me to Bishop, so I told her, explaining that as it happened, I was hoping to ask a few of the locals some questions about the place, and what it might be like the live there.
Americans are generally incredibly warm and friendly people, and she kindly chatted with me for a good while.
A few hours later I was killing time, and found myself walking into a bar.
There were only two customers in there, and one of them was the lass from the bookstore, the other her partner.
She spotted me, told the barmaid what I was doing in town, at which there appeared on the bar a bottle of obscure Irish Whiskey, and a lively and fascinating conversation ensued.
That was last night, and that's how I got to be here, tonight, standing in the middle of this Bishop side road at midnight.
All the houses are silent and dark, save for one over there, where lights are on; whence comes the sound of laughter, whooping and yahooing, floating sensual and fast to my ears on a strong current of humanity and whimsy.
That is the house where I spent this evening. Thanks to my new friends, I returned from the drive to my mountain earlier today armed with the knowledge that I was expected at a barbecue poker party that evening.
After two hugely enjoyable nights in Bishop and two very exciting, enlightening and draining days, I leave now able to finish my novel; with a welcome promise of a place to stay; with an invitation to do a reading and a signing at Bishop's Spellbinder Books; with new friends.
Best of all, once again I found out what years on the road taught me as a younger man: that people are good. We are a kind, generous and great species, and we must never allow the fear merchants to rob us of that knowledge.
The next day I drive south, along the edge of the Death Valley and the Mojave Desert, watching the brown mountains slowly lose their snow.
The long and many hours slide by in a mesmerising race for home. Finally I hit US 5, the two-lane straight line that shoots you from Southern to Northern California, and 24 hours later I have dropped the tank off, and returned to Andrew's, shaking with relief, trembling at my achievement, and buzzing with adrenaline.
My mobile phone rings. My dad is in Intensive Care. I must return to England.
Yes, I am, as I hoped, feeling very much alive. But in the midst of life we are in death.

I'm seeing how the other half live, by living like my sister!

My sister is a wonderful and beautiful person, as are her two daughters, my nieces. Not only are they attractive, generous and warm-hearted, but also they enjoy a lifestyle that ranks them up there with the 'beautiful people'.
For the last nine days, while they are away in Beverly Hills on a working holiday, I have been living alone in their house, looking after their two cats and being around for my parents, who live just around the corner.
Thankfully my Dad is now back home, feeling generally better, and as far as he is concerned, altogether fine.
The rest of us are still living each day as it comes, because we, possibly more than him, are fully aware of the gravity of what happened.
Had I not offered to stay here, my sister would have cancelled her holiday, so it really was not a difficult decision to make.
These trips to southern California are vital to my sister, not only because they replenish her spirit and soul, but also because she is able to do vital business, as the most exclusive of high fashion companies come to sell their lines to her as she sunbathes by the hotel pool.
From one tiny clothes shop in north-west London, my sister has for the last 30 years financed the lifestyles to which she and her girls have become accustomed. My respect for her knows no bounds, especially as she has done with her life exactly what I have done with mine own: identify what it is she loves to do, and then made a living out of it.
The main difference between us is that while my lifestyle is full to the brim with the riches of humanity and love, it is not exactly stuffed with cash, whereas my sister's is, to use one of her favourite words, 'stunning.'
Each day during my stay I endeavour to do the two things that maintain my sanity; that is, to walk and to write.
The former has proved easy, although trailing along the pavements of polluted London roads serves only to make me really miss my view over Galway Bay to County Clare.
The latter, the writing, has proved more difficult. Even though the house is empty save for me and the cats, there flows through the place an incredible and seemingly endless torrent of staff who come to 'do' things.
In the last seven days, the house has been cleaned twice by Milla, who sings as she bangs around the house. After she left on the first day the place was immaculate, and the next day, as far as I could make out, she stripped the beds of the very same sheets she had cleaned the previous day, washed and ironed the sheets and then remade the same beds with the same sheets.
A few days later the lovely Yasmin came to wash down the paintwork and clean the house yet again.
By the time she arrived, the house had also been visited by the gardener; the pool man (who, as far as I could make out, did nothing but take a leaf blower to the leaves floating on top of the cover of the heated swimming pool in the back garden!); the car washers and the window cleaners.
How fantastic it must be to go off on holiday leaving your house messy and dirty, only to return to find it all shiny and sparkly, fluffed up pretty pillows sitting on pristine ironed sheets.
In the meantime, I am losing touch with reality. Life as I normally know it is but a distant memory. I have been home for 9 days in 5 weeks, and feel a little bewildered in my sister's world of luxury.
As I sit simultaneously recording and watching TV programmes on her Sky+ big screen TV, I watch the steam rising from her swimming pool, aware that under the pool cover, a wheeled droid patrols the pool bottom, cleaning algae and picking up leaves as it goes on its 24 hour a day journey.
Everywhere I go there are TV's. There is of course a TV in the TV room, but there is also one in the lounge-dining room, and one in each of the four bedroom upstairs. In bed at night, as I reach for the remote control to adjust the air-conditioning, I worry how this house leaves upon our planet a carbon footprint the size of Cyprus.
As I sit here scribbling, the dishwasher gurgles behind me, reminding me of a time 20 years ago when my lovely nieces visited me in my London flat.
I always took them both out on their birthdays, and the highlight of each trip would be a ride on a bus, because Uncle Charlie didn't have a car back then.
My nieces are heavenly creatures, but they never travelled on public transport, so I saw these treats as part of their education.
Anyway, on one such occasion, just before we were about to leave the flat, I was finishing off washing a few dishes that had been lying in the sink.
The older of my nieces suddenly frowned and looked plain scared.
"Ch-Ch-Charlie! What are you doing?" she spluttered.
"I'm just doing the dishes!" I replied, only to see her take a deep lungful of breath and scan every nook and cranny of my skanky old kitchen.
"But but but where is you dishwasher?" they chorused together.
"Don't have one, girls. Not everybody has a dishwasher, you know!"
But, quite simply, they didn't, and they still don't.
I begrudge my sister and her girls not one penny-pinching grote of their lovely life. I am happy that they can drive their Mercs and Beemers around the leafy suburbs. They work bloody hard and happen to sell a lot of very expensive clothes to exceedingly wealthy people.
All I wonder is that if they have never experienced any kind of real or relative financial hardship, how on earth do they fully appreciate what they have?
Personally, I love my life the way it is back in Salthill, and having lived way too close to several fiscal edges, am most thankful for everything I own and rent.
Obviously I never want my sister and her daughters to suffer in any way, but I hope that in their quest for the heights of style they do not miss the wonders of the true substance of life.
cadley1@eircom.net