The Vagabond's Breakfast - Richard Gwyn

THE VAGABOND'S BREAKFAST –

RICHARD GWYN

Richard Gwyn? No, I've never heard of him either. But just because we don't know the name of an author doesn't mean we should ignore him because if we did that all the time we'd still only be reading, for example, Jeffery Archer. Which raises an obvious question: What is it that attracts us to certain books? Mostly it's what's on the spine, of course, because that's all we initially see when on a shelf. So it's going to be the author's name, the title, the design, the publisher, the colour, or even the hype and a good publicity campaign. Not to mention what Jung termed 'synchronicity' – but that's a whole other story.

On pulling out the book we initially look at the front cover, then the back cover for the blurb, then we open up the book and choose a page at random (never the end) and read a snatch of it. On these things we make a decision as to whether we buy the book but more importantly, whether we are going to devote our time and attention to it. Whether we are going to give a portion of our lives to it.

And so to The Vagabond's Breakfast by Richard Gwyn. I presume it was the title that first caught my attention because I didn't know what it meant? Or perhaps it was synchronicity? The cover at a glance was nondescript and gave away no clues. The blurb on the back on scanning it said something about 'vagrancy and alcoholism in the Mediterranean, principally Spain and Crete'. On opening a page at random I fell upon the author expounding upon the imbibing of datura on Crete.

I bought the book.

Richard Gwyn is the Director of the MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing at Cardiff University, or at least he was when this book was published in 2011. Before this, however, he had spent 10 years as an itinerant worker/vagabond alcoholic in countries around the Mediterranean, some of those years being on the island of Crete.

Gwyn cleverly weaves his memoir between tales and anecdotes from those times and his present day situation where he is suffering from insomnia whilst waiting for a liver transplant due to contracting hepatitis C; all interlaced with thoughts and meditations on various subjects dear to him. It all makes for a surprisingly good and very beautifully written book.

As a teenager I also lived in Greece for a few years living the life of a traveller and for a couple of those years I too lived on Crete where I worked on building sites and farms and in saw mills and factories. I lived in pension houses, proper rented houses, in community shared houses and for long periods of time in no house at all, choosing instead to sleep on beaches, in woods and on mountains. I was a beach bum, a mountain boy, a Cretan cowboy. This, coincidentally, was at the same time as when Richard Gwyn was there.

Did I meet him? I'm not sure. We were certainly moving in the same circles and crossing paths with the same kind of people. I met so many different characters during that period that it's hard to recall all of them after all these years although the name of one of the people Gwyn talks about – a German called Hubert – certainly rings a bell.

In his book, Gwyn describes the kafenions populated by 'carousing travellers, the post-punk detritus of northern Europe and stoned hippies who had got lost on their way back from India'. I too have met these people in similar eateries. He describes hauling bags of cement up flights of stairs when labouring on so-called Cretan construction sites. He describes working in the giant green houses, picking tomatoes, cucumbers and bananas in the suffocating heat. These things I too have done.

He writes about the Romany gypsies of Crete who I too have travelled with, romantically viewing them at the time as being like gold-toothed Apache indian warriors. He writes about the kamakia of Crete, the local boys who were basically studs servicing the tourist women on holiday from Germany and Sweden. I had been wearing a Crass badge at the time – the anarchist symbol with the snapped sub-machine gun above it – and the local kamakia befriended me because of that badge. They knew nothing about Crass but they knew what anarchy was.

And he writes about datura, otherwise known as jimson weed, a wild-growing plant found in Greece that just also happens to be a very powerful hallucinogen.

Gwyn describes his experience of imbibing the seeds of the datura plant in a very open and honest manner, neither deluding himself about nor denying what occurred during his trip and neither exulting or downplaying the experience. He admits that at the time he knew very little about datura apart from the reading of Carlos Castaneda books, this being very understandable. There was no Internet back then so these kind of things were very hard to reference. Nowadays you can look up 'datura' on Wikipedia and even view footage on YouTube of Terence McKenna advising to be very wary of the plant. Back then, however, you just took the big plunge, as Patti Smith once put it.

'In terms of hallucinogenic experience,' Gwyn writes 'datura is a world apart from LSD or mescaline: recreational it is not. It will, if such language has any meaning, attempt to infiltrate the soul. Specifically, I was made acutely aware of the existence, parallel to our own visible world, of a wondrous and terrifying otherworld in which we were unwitting participants. That this otherworld was as real as the one we normally inhabit was never in doubt while under the influence of the datura plant. I still retain the vivid impression that for one night and part of the following day the veil between these worlds had been removed.'

During my time on Crete I too imbibed datura seeds but unlike Gwyn I'd never read Carlos Castaneda so knew even less about the plant than what he did. Little did I know that it was a plant that such people as Nepalese shamen and holy men specialised in taking.

Years later, I recall very little of the experience apart from a distinct feeling of levitating 15 feet in the air and seemingly seeing, sharing and experiencing other people's dreams and hallucinations. The sense of the 'otherworld' was also palpable, where every word spoken was loaded to the max and every gesture, every touch, every glance was unspoken communication conveying volumes. No Howard Marks was I but I do recall coming back to the UK with a tobacco tin full of datura seeds to distribute to interested parties though I never took them myself again. Without any doubt, datura is the most strangest drug I've ever taken and it would appear that Richard Gwyn might feel the same.

The datura episode Gwyn writes about, however, is but one very short chapter and in no way is The Vagabond's Breakfast solely a drug book. In fact, I wouldn't even say alcohol is a major theme in the book either. Richard Gwyn's memoir is instead a story about the getting of wisdom. It's the story of the author losing himself so as to be able to find himself. Above all, I would say it's a very inspiring example of how to write a very good book indeed.

John Serpico