Welcome to Travels With Greg, the slow dribble that passes for a memoir of my six-week documentary shoot through Europe in Autumn 2004. In our last installment, sleep deprivation prompted a senseless overseas call. Join me as I buy some books. Yessss. If you’re new to the site, please visit the Table of Contents.

The embarrassing and pointless overseas phone call to my boss seemed to clear the fatigue toxins from my brain. As soon as I put the phone back in its cradle, clarity began to seep in once more, until I had a few lucid pools to splash through. My sense of the space lost its nightmarish blur as details began to solidify: the wasted faces of other travelers, a tangy American accent complaining to no particular person about the service ethic in British airports, the soft lozenges of light thrown down from windows admitting an English sunrise.

Instead of dwelling on the fact that I’d woken up the producer to tell her that the customs agent had a big nose, I decided to kill a bit of time by taking in the sights and sounds of Heathrow International Airport, Terminal 4.

Like most departure areas in Airport World, Terminal 4 is not designed with comfort in mind for the average traveler. Rows of hard plastic chairs face off against each other in the centre of traffic areas, where people pass back and forth in an agitated current. The overall effect is to make you feel as if you’re marooned on a fortuitous outcrop poking up from a deep and dangerous river. No one wants to sit in these seats.

Fortunately for the traveler, the walls have been liberally lined with stores. An airport franchise must be among the wettest dreams of retailers – hordes of sleep-deprived or otherwise disoriented people caught in that in-between zone, where dimly understood laws hem in movement, but nothing proscribes the exercise of one’s wallet, every hour of the day. Rents must be exorbitant.

Greg was easy to spot. He is one of the few people I know who can rest at ease in airport departure lounges, his hands folded in his lap and his eyes scanning the upper walls. His body, which is too big to meet those chairs comfortably, seems to mould itself without complaint to the chair’s shape. It as if he turns some inner dial to the end of the range and settles on that frequency, all silence, until the boarding call comes. It also helps that Greg is incredibly cheap and will not spend a cent of his own money – unless a pint of beer is involved, which I sense is quietly frowned upon in his household.

I waved as I passed him on the way to a WH Smith, which was part of my plan. Apart from a copy of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, I hadn’t packed any books. We were pushing the weight limit with our checked and carry-on baggage, so I’d decided beforehand to buy my reading material along the way. As I finished a novel, I would leave it in my hotel room for the next guests, whether they were fluent in English or not. This is my genius mind at work.

The store had a special on fiction – 3 paperbacks for 18 pounds – so I scanned and scanned. Mostly I just pulled out novel after novel to look at the different cover art. More than anything else, the unexpected illustrations on book covers told me that I had traveled overseas, that I was really here for six weeks, and that, short of a nervous breakdown, my entire path for those weeks was laid out in a neat black binder. I picked Perdido Street Station for its reassuring bulk, Middlesex for its alternate cover, and Yellow Dog, out of a (deeply misplaced) loyalty to Martin Amis.

Welcome to Travels With Greg, my slowly unfolding story of a six-week documentary shoot through Europe in 2004. In my last entry, Greg and I had landed at Heathrow. Now, sleep-deprived and unwilling, I need to find Customs in Terminal 4. God help me. If this site is new territory for you, visit the Table of Contents to get caught up.

Whenever you hear people talk about fatigue, they often say that it sneaks, steals or creeps up on you. In my case, fatigue stepped out of the crowd of morning travellers and whammied me with a cartoon mallet. One moment I was strolling down the corridor, keeping an eye on the signs; the next moment, everything started to slide upward. My inner ear screamed its warnings at my brain that I was tipping, tilting and slipping over, but my brain ignored them, focusing instead on keeping my feet galumphing forward. Help, I thought, there’s a war on between my internal parts, but nothing would come out of my mouth. Brain, don’t let the carnet slip out of my hand. You do this and we’ll sleep for forty-eight hours straight.

By the time I found Customs I was nearly delirious and barely able to force out a sentence, which did not endear me to the freckle-spattered young woman with a blond pageboy and a prominent nose who stood behind the partition. I kept focusing on the nose, which seemed just a hair too big for her face. It was one of those details that, once noticed, command all your attention.

— I have a carnet, I told the officer’s nose. But my luggage is still in transit to Amsterdam.

The officer’s nose flared in sympathy. There are few hard and fast rules in the world of carnets, chiefly because most customs agents aren’t clear on the rules. But here’s the numero uno rule: You must at the very least have the goods listed on the carnet in your possession. Most often Customs won’t bother to look at them, but if you show up with a form that says I have $30,000 of film and video gear but you have only a passport and a lint-covered wine gum in your pocket, you will not be taken at your word.

— Maybe you should wait until you land in Amsterdam and have Customs deal with it there, the officer suggested.

When your brain is plagued by swarms of sleep toxins, decision-making becomes torturous and fearful. Small matters turn into huge priorities, obvious actions become weighted down with trivia, and you might as well tie your brain in a bag and swing it into the Thames. It was not important, really, that I had to wait to get the carnet stamped in Amsterdam; without the equipment handy, it was the only available course of action. No big deal. I decided to call my producer back home, where it was at least two in the morning, and tell her all about it.

She picked up after five rings.

— Hello?

— Heather? It’s Aidan.

Over the thousands of miles of undersea cable, I could almost hear her brain creaking into action.

— Hello there. Is everything going well?

— I couldn’t get it to work, Heather.

— What?

— We’re in Heathrow. No luggage. Need to get. Carnet stamped. In Amsterdam.

— Okay.

— I guess I didn’t need to phone you up and tell you this right now.

— No, it’s fine. You can call whenever you think you need to.

— Heather?

— Yes?

— The customs officer had this big nose.

— You call when it’s important, Aidan.

She hung up, leaving me with the distinct impression that I had used up my one free nincompoop call exactly one day into a 41 day trip. As the post-punk kids on the corner say: Go me.

Ahoy.  You are reading Travels With Greg, the story of my six-week documentary shoot through Europe in the fall of 2004.  Join us as we enter Inner Airport World at Heathrow.  If you’re new to the TWG experience, you can visit the Table of Contents and get all nice and caught up. 

After taking us on a nice slow tour of the airport’s exterior, Flight 868, the seven-hour Pearson to Heathrow haul, ambled up to the gate at 6:25 a.m.  This was the most interminable part of the entire flight, the wait to unsnap our seatbelts and reach for our luggage.  A few tentative metallic sounds could be heard here and there in the cabin, the signal of the brave and independent few who risked unbuckling before the little seatbelt went out with a flat slideshow ‘ding’.  And then the sudden crush of everybody standing up all at once, affecting an air of nonchalance, as if they’re waiting for a light at a corner and not dying to get off a stuffy jet.

When the mild English September air from the sleeve began to filter in, we all realized how badly we smelled.  Sweat, breath, packets of peanuts and bottles of wine were exhaled with us as we walked up the sleeve that fed us into the body of the terminal.  One thing about Heathrow: the signage can be terrible, sometimes nothing more than a piece of paper with a “THIS WAY” helpfully Sharpied on by a construction worker, so the best thing to do is follow the mass of people.  One or two people can lose their way, but two hundred people have an unerring sense of direction and a steady momentum that detests resistance.  The mass of motor impulses and unconscious decisions, when distributed amongst a crowd, somehow knows which doors to ignore and what waits at the end of the line.

At the end of the line was the longest airport line-up I’d ever seen, with the exception of an early morning flight I once took from Vegas to Chicago.  Like all airport security and immigration lines, this one was folded into a wide deep space, so that progress actually involved shuffling back and forth parallel to the row of security gates, where the dull-eyed and dangerous airport employees, with their wands and scanners and lists of questions, waited to process us all for entry into Inner Airport World.

Continue reading ‘travels with greg - day 2.1′

Holy crap, people?  Could it be that I’m out of the country, at long finally last?  Yes it could!  It’s a shorty but a goody as I tell you all about the experience of sitting on a plane and eating a vegan breakfast on an international Air Canada flight.  If you’re just catching up now, go to the index page and read Travels With Greg, my epic tale of a six-week documentary shoot through Europe in the fall of 2004.

I sleep badly on planes.  Most passengers will tell you that they sleep badly on planes, but I’ve seen them at 3am in the taupe-shadowed darkness of the cabin, propped against each other like old paperbacks and snoring away to the rhythm  of the engines.  I prefer to sit in my cone of blue light, going over the same few passages in my book or trying to follow the thread of the movie playing on the little LED screen set into the back of my seat.  Every so often an attendant will pass by, sometimes giving me a quick smile to commiserate lightly in our shared wakefulness.

Greg gave me the window seat for the Toronto-Heathrow flight.  For Greg, who lives for the moments when the ground can be seen receding or approaching through an oval window on an airplane cabin, this was a generous act.  I had never seen London before, and he wanted me to see London at night.  There was a possibility that we would spend a few days in England at the end of the trip, but that was six weeks in the future, and besides, there were no pages in the binder under tabs 37-41.

London at 5 a.m. was endless and illuminated.  The plane flew at an impossibly correct altitude, just low enough to let me see the detail of the buildings but just high enough to feel as if we were crawling slowly over the city, as a magnifying planchette traces out a line of text on a page.  Clumps of skyscrapers, burning with light, passed underneath, only to be replaced with another clump.  Greg leaned over to get a look.  Do you see it? he said.  What do you see?

He wanted me to tell him that I could see Big Ben and Westminster Abbey and that ridiculous fucking ferris wheel.  I couldn’t even find a comparison to sum up what I was seeing, except to say that it seemed like huge outlined geometric shapes all pressing into each other and shaken by the river - shaken too slowly to see, but yawing back and forth nonetheless, as if one end of the Thames were being cracked like a whip.  Other cities are easier to take in at a glance: Los Angeles looks like a giant microchip, for instance; it looks frighteningly like the Machine City in The Matrix.  Manila from the air looks like a ball of dark yarn covered in red and white crumbs.  London looks like tectonic forces, which is hard to explain at five in the morning.

A few people had already woken up and were staring out the window at the city beneath.  The lights came on and we could hear the metal clanking of meal carts, then the maddening experience of waiting for the meal cart, with its steamed prepackaged breakfast food.  On a whim I’d requested the vegan option, which turned out to be either flavourless stir frys with tofu or, in the case of breakfast, the regular meal with everything interesting removed.  I picked at breakfast as the sky lightened and London began to speed faster beneath us, on its way to Heathrow.

Whoah?  Will we make it to Heathrow?  Or do we, um, die, or get rerouted to Leicestershire or something?  Will there even be an airport in Leicestershire if we fly there?  I can’t take the suspense, people: come back soon.

This is the fifth part of Travels With Greg, the story of my six-week documentary shoot through six countries in Western Europe. Join us as I write yet another entry that does not take us out of the country.

If you want to start from the start (the better to get a piece of my heart) go to the Travels Index.

Once firmly in the air, after the turbulence of penetrating layers of atmosphere had died down and the pale seatbelt logos had winked out, I reached under the seat (I always keep one piece of carry-on in the overhead rack, one beneath the seat) and pulled out my travel binder. I never examined the binder in depth until I was on my way to the first destination. This was not laziness (although there may have been a touch of arrogance or plain hubris in there somewhere); any trip longer than seven to ten days often contained so many complications that the binders were assembled and reassembled by researchers and coordinators up to the last possible moment. It was completely against company policy, and it was utterly typical. Interviewees and locations would call up and change their minds, demand money, suddenly remember that the shoot day, cleared a month before, happened to be some great-aunt’s birthday, and could we come by an hour later? Or the next day?

This binder wasn’t even complete. Days 20-41 existed only as tabs. Somewhere along the line the rest of the material, the call sheets, questions, crib sheets and maps would be faxed or couriered out to us, wherever we might be in the wilds of Western Europe. In the meantime, I had nineteen days to map out in my head, although experience had long ago shown me how useless this was. The shoot never matched the sheets properly, especially in foreign countries. At best they served as horns that you could grip as the shoot bucked wildly underneath you.

Hey Greg, I said. We’re going to interview a wooden shoemaker in Amsterdam.

Greg nodded. That sounds like fun, he said.

Greg had a way of deadpanning the word “fun” to make it sound more like “hell”.

Continue reading ‘travels with Greg - day 1.4′

I say ‘Ola’ to you because this is my grown-up and entirely desperate version of Dora the Explorer. This is the fourth entry in the ongoing story of my six-week documentary shoot through Europe in the autumn of 2004. Four entries in and I still haven’t left - I haven’t even boarded the plane yet. Already this memoir of six weeks shooting a documentary series throughout western Europe is taking longer than the actual trip. It will never end. I am writing it and writing it. It will never end. And I’m switching to present tense for this entry, because it suits my memory. Visit the travels index above the header to find your way along.

A friend of mine asked me the other day if this story is my masterpiece, or the thing that I have to get out of my way before I write my masterpiece. Three pints of beer had lit the fire of honesty within me (because beer’s naturally inflammable, so the metaphor works, you see); I said, “It’s… um… the thing”.

Most international airports tuck their Customs Office away in hard-to-find corners, weird empty culs de sac or hidden hallways. You won’t find the office without careful instructions, and once you get there, the office is invariably a tiny room with a plexiglass grille separating you from the bored man in white shirtsleeves. There is no way of knowing how far Customs will be from your departure gate. There is no guarantee that Customs even exists in the same terminal.

Greg and I have walked into strange spaces in our history of foraging for Customs offices. Long empty hallways with all the ceiling tiles torn out, wires and ducts snaking everywhere like an abandoned set from Brazil; a huge room with a middle-aged Sikh man seated at one end behind a desk, whose sole function was to point at the sign that pointed to the exit; empty areas adorned with huge signs advising you that alarms will sound if you stop walking; clean white corridors branching rhizomatically into the null-space of Airport World, the extradimensional bubble blown into reality by the bureaucratic sighs of nation-states. Sometimes I imagine that there is only one airport, an endless building of conveyor belts and sunglasses stands that spills out into our world at certain points, and there’s a door somewhere that will take me into the in-between spaces. Not that I would want to meet the people who live and work there.

Continue reading ‘travels with greg - day 1.3′

This is the third part of Travels with Greg, the story of a six-week documentary shoot in Europe in the fall of 2004. You can read parts 1 and 2 here and here.

At eight in the morning the offices were usually empty, with the exception of a couple of editors finishing the graveyard shift, trudging up and down the halls in sock feet and eating from cups of ichiban. The only other person in the building iwas Angela, the production coordinator, her eyes foggy with the early hour. Angela’s job was to get us to the airport and make sure we have all the equipment and paperwork necessary to get us through the next six weeks.

OUR EQUIPMENT

The equipment, all 200+ pounds of the stuff in two oversized, armoured and padded cases, was chiefly concerned with the production and manipulation of light. We had flags, blacks and hoods to block light. We had silks and bounces to diffuse and direct light. We had cookies and gobos to slice light into patterns that suggested venetian blinds, or cut it into mottles meant to emulate an unseen canopy. We had bits of fake greenery to cast shadows. One betacam, one DVcam, one 16mm Arri, one still camera to capture the light. Tapes and film stock to record it all.

Then the jumble of extension cords and electrical equipment, bags of clothespins, c-stands and tripods, convertors and adaptors, power supplies and battery packs, along with a light meter, a monitor, and tools for any bizarre situation. A mini-boom, two lapel mics. Then there were the lights themselves in a separate case: two 150 watts, two 300 watts, and a hulking 650 that would stun your eyes into submission if you happened to be looking at it when the switch was thrown. Greg had packed it all the night before, but we went over it again; a crew doing reenactment shooting might have come in during the night and cannibalized our gear.

Continue reading ‘travels with greg - day 1.2′

This is Part Two of Travels With Greg.  You can read Part One here.

THE ITINERARY

Week 1 – The Netherlands

horrible disaster discussed: the North Sea Flood

plus: Bruno the klompenböer; the longest bicycle in the world; the biggest field hockey stick ever

Week 2 – south of France

horrible disaster discussed: the Malpasset Dam Failure

plus: no santons

Week 3 – Germany

horrible disaster discussed: The Oppau Explosion

plus: the world’s longest car; largest marsupial; biggest turtle; most ginormous cuckoo clock

Week 4 – western Austria

horrible disaster discussed: Blons Avalanche

plus: Head Sport ski factory; the world’s tiniest model trains that turned out not to be particularly small

Week 5 – horrible horrible Belgium

horrible disaster discussed: Meuse Valley Killer Fog

plus: a parade of lead-poisoned Walloons dead set on making my life miserable; world’s smallest blooming plant; manneken pis

Week 6 – England

horrible disaster discussed: Queen Mary Collision

plus: world’s biggest goddamn restaurant bill ever

Week 1, day 1 – 6:00-8:00 am

It’s a common experience among travelers to wake up and not know where they are. To open your eyes and have nothing match, no thought connect to thought, no wall or window or hotel art print meet up with anything in your mind. It’s like the first split second of a helicopter ride, when you realize that you are abruptly no longer touching ground and the entire machine feels like a rocking cradle in a thunderstorm.

That never once happened to me on the road. I would close my eyes each night with the following day mapped out in my head. As soon as I opened my eyes again, I was on. I was working, and all my job consisted of was following the map that had been prepared for me. That’s the first talent of a field producer. The second talent is not blowing up when the map turns out be completely wrong, when the day suddenly flips over and you’re traversing an unknown geography full of strange roads, missed appointments and a flat tire on the edge of some city a whole hemisphere from home.

Continue reading ‘travels with greg, day 1.1′

This is the first of a series of day-by-day entries on my six-week documentary shoot through Western Europe in 2004. Warning: there was no sex on this trip, unless you’re counting the highly audible Dutch couple in the adjacent room. Up until then I never realized that inarticulate grunts and cries were delivered in accents. That was day 6 of 41.

From 2003 to 2005 I worked as a field producer/unit director for a small but plucky, but ruthlessly cheap, television production company. My job was to go on the road with a cameraman (unless we were crossing international borders, in which case he was the Director of Photography) and shoot interviews for one-off documentaries and low-low budget series on crimes and historical disasters, the kind that typically end up on cable specialty channels. We also did kid’s shows, which usually meant that I would end up running a shoot involving a pack of sad clowns or a giant lobster. Those were not the highlights of my career.

In some ways it was an ideal job: I only visited the office twice in the course of an assignment (once to load the equipment up, once to unload); I usually had two to three weeks to spend at home between assignments; and I was usually, although certainly not always, sent to interesting places, locales that I had barely even dreamed of visiting. I took helicopter rides over the Alps, climbed a volcano in the Philippines, picked wild blackberries at the foot of Roman ruins. On the less positive side, the shows I shot for were budgeted as tightly as possible, which meant eight- to twelve-hour days, six days a week, invading strangers’ houses three times a day to set up lights and interrogate them. Some of the motels were so cheap that sometimes I feared to lean against the wall lest the sheet of chipboard collapse and send me flying into the neighbour’s bathroom. After three weeks of driving around foreign cities and grilling strangers about old crimes and disasters, I would be longing to get back home to see my wife.

Continue reading ‘travels with greg - day 0′