Viking Blood

Imagine yourself walking along a beach, just off the wet sand, daring the water to flood the arches of your feet. You walk for a while and slowly you notice that the tide is going down and you walk among little pools of trapped water. Suddenly shells appear, and crabs dashing for cover, and bits of seaweed. Now replace all the shells and plants and driftwood and crabs with people and places and events and things. This vaguely captures how I felt this morning as I staggered out of bed and tried to recall who and where I was. Wandering around Chiang Mai I collected the various flotsam and jetsam of my identity and tried to remember just what was going on. One of those days I guess, where the world seems like a faraway place and one begins to wonder just where one fits inside it.

So imagine if you will peering across to the washed out horizon of one’s self and seeing... a Viking ship. First the sails flush against the wind, peering over the curvature of the earth, and then the bow of dark chocolatey wood... and then the image looms larger by the minute until finally a German man called Milosh shouts out “hey, have you ever meditated?”

Huh?

What is going on?

He hands me a card which I push under the plastic wrapping of my Marlboro lights (I do this because the cigarette packs here have photographs of various awful diseases and I’d been staring at rotting lungs for two days; now covered by Milosh’s card). I’ll describe the card to you. It’s yellow with new roman lettering. On the top it says:

111/3 Moon Mauang Road / Mediation Daily

Under this, inexplicably, are two pictures; one of a dog and the other a cat. I feel out of my depth to speculate what these have to do with the meditative services offered but I can look past it. Under them are some numbers and a yahoo address and the name of a temple: Wat Dok Kham.

“From Malta!” Milosh exclaims (naturally, we’ve fast forwarded a bit here and he didn’t simply exclaim this at random... though it would have been very pleasant if he did).

“I have been to Malta! To Gee-gaan-tee- ya and wid is zuwr rik and Medina...” he says articulating each place name with no small degree of imagination. Milosh tells us about himself; he says he speaks eight languages and is a palaeontologist. He claims that he is well versed in the history of all countries and that he learned to meditate from a man who lives in the jungle.

“You could pass for a German” he notices “do your parents also come from Malta”.

I assure him that though I can’t prove without a shadow of a doubt that they do, they’re good people and I was quite prepared to go on their word that they are. I went on to say that my blond hair, fair skin and blue eyes are inexplicable, a freak genetic mutation.

“Do you know why you look the way you do?” he asks.

“Hmm, could it be that the universe is actually the world’s most complicated jigsaw puzzle and somebody fucked up?” I wonder.

“Do you know wid is zuwrik?” he asks again.

“Yup.”

“That’s where the Vikings landed on Malta”

“Shit, really? Are you trying to tell me that I’m a Viking?”

“Yes”

“You really think so?”

“Definitely”

“I knew it”

Somewhere deep inside I guess I always kind of knew I was a Viking. I mean this explains so much. My love of the open sea; my desire to wear a helmet with horns; my love of drinking out of inconvenient cone shaped things. As a young boy I always felt different. All the other boys would play football and all I ever wanted to do was rape and pillage. ‘Little Raper and Pillager’ I suspect they would have called me in a more Viking-tolerant society. And here lies the subject of my greatest confusion. ‘Why me?’

Why was I called upon to be different? To be a Viking in a world that doesn’t understand my kind? Okay before this all becomes too silly, I’ve made two lists:

Things that make me Viking-like:
I’d quite like to go to Valhalla when I die, as it’s the closest afterlife to a videogame that I’ve heard of so far.
I’ve always wanted a nickname and I think Beppe the Magniferous would be quite good.
It’s blonde all the way down.
I didn’t hate the trailer to ‘Beowolf’.

Things that make me un-Viking-like:
I’m not sure how I feel ethically about furs.
I’m quite shy to use urinals in clubs, I’m not sure what the Viking-ship lavatorial situation is, but it doesn’t seem promising.
I can’t grow a very thick beard, but I’d definitely be into the plaits.

Right so; after a bathroom break that was a little bit more urgent than I would have liked, I have come to the conclusion that Vikings were the original hippies. I suppose the long hair and full beards were the first giveaway but there’s also the fact that all the little Viking boys and girls left their Viking homes and Viking parents (who were probably all stiff upper-middle class Viking accountants working in Mergers and Acquisitions) and dropped out of their Viking undergraduate courses to strike out on their own. Since caravanning and fjords probably don’t mix they decided to use quaint little ships instead. Armed with a poorly defined notion of a free spirited life they backpacked their way through Europe, taking from the various villages and towns they happened upon in a mead-induced haze without ever really giving anything back to society until much later in their fourties.

Hmm.

Perhaps Milosh was on the money.

I am a Viking with a Degree and a fear of urinal cakes.